Celebrated author Margaret Atwood gets ‘perplexing’ NZ reviews

Two-time Booker Prize winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood is copping flak in New Zealand, days after weighing in on Brisbane City Council banning protesters from libraries.

LONDON, ENGLAND (L-R) Joint winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo during 2019 Booker Prize Winner Announcement. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)

One of the world’s most celebrated literary authors Margaret Atwood is getting a bit of a panning across Te Tai-O-Rehua (the Tasman Sea).

Award-winning NZ novelist Paula Morris’s take on the premiere literary event In Conversation with Margaret Atwood event in Auckland on Tuesday night was visceral. The headline “Atwood, Swarbrick and an Expensive Waste of Everyone’s Time”.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood slams Brisbane council over XR library ban

Margaret Atwood: Inside the mind of The Handmaid’s Tale author

Morris writes for New Zealand’s Newsroom. “If Atwood was prickly with Kim Hill in Wellington she was patronising in Auckland with Chloe Swarbrick”.

At The Spinoff Holly Walker writes “An expensive, perplexing night with Margaret Atwood and Kim Hill”.

The author arrives in Australia this weekend and heads to Brisbane on Feb. 22 where tickets still remain to see the two-time Booker Prize winning author speak about her latest work the blockbuster “The Testaments”.

Interviewing Atwood does feel like standing at the edge of a cliff hoping you don’t fall off.

As a fan of her work it’s a dream, as a journalist a nightmare.

And I am not alone.

Take The Times Style magazine editor-in-chief Lorraine Candy who wrote last year “As we draw towards our interview date, I become convinced it’s going to be a disaster. Atwood is extraordinarily intelligent, she has read every book in civilisation and remembers every fact. Like every glorious icon in their eighth decade, she does not suffer fools.

Or the opener to Helen Rumbelow’s (The Times Books) interview where Atwood says ‘I’m am quite mean and scary. But only if you start first”.

Rumbelow goes on in the copy “I’m a little nervous” and further Rumbelow relates her question to Atwood.

Rumbelow: “Do you fear mortality”.

Atwood: “No. Everybody has died so far!”.

MORE

Exclusive interview with Margaret Atwood

THE HANDMAID'S TALE -- The drama series, based on the award-winning, best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood Offred (Elisabeth Moss), shown. (Photo by: Take Five/Hulu)

What to ask the woman who has already been asked by journalists and readers across the globe, a myriad (if not nauseating number of times) why did you return to Gilead?

Roughly the same answer every time.

The readers asked for it.

Why didn’t you return to Offred?

I couldn’t find the voice.

Makes sense. Offred was utterly distinctive. Voice is hard to find. It resonates in time and place. What Atwood found instead was three rich voices; two new and one we had already been absorbed and confused and horrified by – Aunt Lydia, now that’s a character.

But how to go there either.

What about anger?

She’s spoken about it before and the incredible Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “About Anger”.

Atwood often talks about Le Guin both when she talks about why she doesn’t write dragons and why she loves the author’s work.

So Aunt Lydia and anger. Here goes.

Me. Did you always know the origin of Aunt Lydia’s anger?

Atwood. “Aunt Lydia. No, because in The Handmaids Tale she’s a secondary tale and we see her only from the outside, but I have always been interested in collaborationists and why they collaborate. So there’s always a story there. There is always a narrative it’s just we don’t always get to hear that but quite often in totalitarianisms like that your choices are limited, protest and you’re dead, protest overtly and you’re dead, you join the resistance and risk your life. You can become part of the power structure and try to survive as best you can ... quite frequently you get purged by other people who want your job or you can do what a number of people have done in totalitarianisms .. that is burrow away from within.

“We all have those potentials. The kind of life we find ourselves in usually pushes us up against the wall and makes us choose.”

Is Atwood angry?

Is she fed up with current politics and its perpetual rhyming across time – history doesn’t repeat it rhymes, this is a well-known quote used towards the end of The Testaments.

Does she want something fresh?

I can almost hear her say: what like fresh linen?

Well yes. You make a bed you have to lie in it. We can also change the sheets.

And it feels like that is what Margaret Atwood is really talking about. Changing things. Doing things differently.

Then again, least we confuse Margaret Atwood with her characters – an easy thing for readers to do. Writers complain/talk about it all the time.

In her ‘prickly’ Wellington interview with Kym Hill, as reported by Morris, Atwood said exactly that “don’t confuse me with my characters”.

Hill: “I would never do that!”

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. Photo. supplied.

Wellington was prickly and in Auckland things apparently haven’t got much better. If you are to believe Morris or Walker.

Or maybe like a lot of things on social media we have a penchant for the worst. (Check out the Facebook feed on either, seems the audience mostly loved it, all of it.)

Atwood is one of our greatest writers. She sees the world through characters that come from within it, characters of all forms and shapes. She is a polymath. She is 80-years-old. She knows a lot. She’s seen a lot.

Maybe in not answering the same questions over and over she is asking us to find a new question.

I wanted to ask: what would you like to talk about but feared a lob at me for taking an easy road, a get out rather than doing the work to find the right question for her.

I don’t know. I think it remains, my question: what do you want to talk about Margaret Atwood?

But perhaps the answer is: it will be in my next book.

She has a long-awaited book of poetry ‘Dearly’ coming out later this year and I can’t wait.

--