By FELICIA R. LEE
September 22, 2009
They are her characters and her catastrophes, but Margaret Atwood says she sometimes frightens even herself when her imagination gets going. The latest dystopian speculations from this celebrated Canadian writer can be found in her novel “The Year of the Flood” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), to be published in the United States on Tuesday.
It is a tale of survivors in a violent future society after a catastrophic pandemic, with genetically engineered humans and animals, an environment in tatters and a cult dedicated to merging science, nature and religion.
“I find myself scaring myself silly,” Ms. Atwood confessed during a recent interview in New York. She flew in from her home in Toronto to have lunch at a Midtown vegetarian restaurant before becoming immersed in a book tour with stops in Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the United States.
What is scary, Ms. Atwood said, is that her futuristic tales — she calls them speculative fiction — showcase scenarios that spring from current realities: the creep of corporations into many aspects of society, environmental decay, high-tech reproduction, the widening cleavage between haves and have-nots.
“I don’t write about Planet X, I write about where we are now,” said Ms. Atwood, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize for “The Blind Assassin.” She is probably best known for the now classic feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” published in the mid-’80s and set in a future right-wing theocracy.
“We’ve just opened the biggest toy box in the world, which is the genetic code,” said Ms. Atwood, who turns
The author of more than 35 books of fiction, poetry, children’s literature and nonfiction, whose numerous awards make her literary royalty, Ms. Atwood is receiving mostly good reviews for “The Year of the Flood.” Fear of failure is not one of the scary things keeping her up at night.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ms. Atwood finds reason to be optimistic about the future. “We haven’t dropped all of our atomic and hydrogen bombs,” she said dryly. An ardent supporter of environmental causes, she said she was also in steady contact with many people who are trying hard to make the world better. “What I tell people is pick one thing,” she said of all the causes out there.
“The big question for human beings is the same for any bio-form: What are we going to eat?” Ms. Atwood said. “Who do we mean by ‘we’? We: you and me in this room? We in North America? It’s no longer true that one ‘we’ has no impact on another ‘we.’ ”
She is certain, though, that if women were in power, they would not oppress men the same way that men have oppressed women.
“It will never happen,” she said. “In strictly biological terms, females’ investment in their children is much larger, with a lot more of their physical self, their physical substance.
“There have been goddesses, powerful female figures, but to my knowledge there has never been a society in which there has been the wholesale oppression of men.”
While Ms. Atwood likes pondering big questions about the human quest for perfection (“Who’s going to be the judge?”) or what she considers the “hard-wired” need for humans to tell stories about their purpose and their origins, she begins the creative process with a character’s voice or image rather than with abstractions.
For “The Year of the Flood” she conjured the voices of Adam One, Ren and Toby. Adam One is the leader of God’s Gardeners, an ascetic cult whose religion inculcates reverence for the environment and animals and a respect for science that rests on the belief that the creation story cannot be taken literally. Ren is a street-savvy dancer who survives the “waterless flood” (the unnamed plague) locked inside a strip club. Toby is a onetime member of the Gardeners who is hiding inside a fancy spa to escape a stalker.
“Flood” is neither a sequel nor a prequel to the 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake” (though “Oryx” does provide a back story). “It’s the same time slice,” Ms. Atwood explained. “It’s different parts of the landscape, seen from very different points of view.” She wrote “Flood” after everybody asked what happened next and is now at work on a third book in the trilogy.
Ms. Atwood, writing in longhand, creates a tree of characters and charts that pinpoint their birthdays, and even casts their horoscopes. She sees in astrology a device to get people to talk about themselves.
“You wouldn’t want your character to have the wrong horoscope any more than you would want them to have the wrong name,” Ms. Atwood said mischievously. She also did considerable research into religious hymns, she said, to come up with the 14 hymns she wrote for God’s Gardeners that appear in the book.
While on tour Ms. Atwood will have a Twitter feed and a blog. At yearoftheflood.com, readers can nominate people who they believe qualify as God’s Gardeners saints. They would join the saints mentioned in the book, a list that includes Al Gore, Rachel Carson and Karen Silkwood.
Ms. Atwood herself is a “strict agnostic,” she said, meaning that she will not present as knowledge something that is unknown. Still, she said she believes in a love match between science and religion, as long as that religion is not one of the standard ones or “a group of people that demonizes everyone else,” or steeped in dogma.
“I think that kind of reconciliation is coming and also has to come if we are to have any hope for the planet,” Ms. Atwood said in an e-mail message. “Either one by itself is too a) unreal, in the sense of misrepresenting the physical universe, or b) bleak, in the sense of leaving a whole area of human experience unrepresented.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/books/22atwood.html?_r=1&ref=books&pagewanted=print
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