CAUGHT between the old world and the new, Britain and the United States Canadian fiction had a difficult time asserting itself. Its international coming of age has been achieved through the work of the late Robertson Davies, the short story writer Alice Munro and one of international fiction's most versatile voices, that of Margaret Atwood who enjoys both an academic and popular readership. The Margaret Atwood Society, which was established as long ago as 1982, is a fact which embarrasses her almost as much as the two aspiring biographers who are currently doing research on her. "I really think I should be dead or something, don't you?"
Tonight she reads at the opening session of the 10th Court Festival of Literature in Galway, and her distinctive tone of knowing, humour and logic applied to a formidable pairing of, often angry, imagination and memory should please her followers and quickly beguile new ones - particularly as she plans to read from her best novel to date, Cat's Eye, a personal, confrontational and often angry narrative which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize.
While the feminist movement attempted from the outset to recruit her as one of its most influential voices, Atwood has always stood apart from such agenda based stances. She is a perceptive, individualist storyteller and no one's cheer leader. "My interest is in human behaviour, how people respond to their lives. I don't like agendas, what's the point of them? I don't like this attitude of, all women are perfect, and all men are wrong. People are people. If I write a novel in which a woman is having a hard life, it's not because she's a woman it's because she's a person, and that's the sort of thing that can happen to people."
Just as she believes it is wrong to generalise about men and women, it is foolish to categorise Atwood's work. "I've moved around a lot; Boston, Vancouver, Berlin, London. . My parents were from Nova Scotia. My books vary; I'm not localised like Alice Munro whose work is rooted in small town rural Canada." Though politically aware, and actively committed to Amnesty International as well as international PEN (Poet, Essayists and Novelists) she is not a political writer. A novel such as the 1986 Booker contender and subsequent international best seller, The Hand Maid's Tale, takes a harrowingly futuristic and cautionary look at a totalitarian society, more speculative than polemical as she believes that polemical fiction tends to kill itself off. Poet, novelist and short story writer, she says of her early career: "I began as a poet. In Canada in the 1960s, it was much easier to get poetry published than fiction."
As a schoolgirl she remembers being taught that fiction was something written by dead English people; "We read and studied Victorian novels. We didn't know there was any other kind."
Small, slightly feline, she has a delicately boned humorous face a direct gaze and a more robust smile than one might expect. Her accent is efficient Toronto; flattened, soft and easy to listen to. But her playful, deadpan delivery is clever, wry and unpredictable. "I grew up in the wild" and it's obvious she enjoys saying this. There was a reason for the relative primitivism. Her father was an entomologist and his work meant that Atwood and her brother lived with their parents in a succession of log cabins throughout Northern Ontario and Quebec in bush country. This life began at the age of five; about the same time that Atwood began writing, a practice which only stopped during the dark years spanning the ages eight to 16.
Her family background gave her an interest in science. It also explains the forensic quality of her attention to detail. "I always check my facts, I always have to know things like when was clingfilm invented or did they have coloured refrigerators in the 1950s?"
DETAILS and things have always been important in her work. Cat's Eye is full of things; clothes, furniture, snow. Often things: appear in surreal settings. She has a good story about when she first moved out of her parents' home and lived in a boarding house in Toronto. Her room didn't even have a sink, so she washed her dishes in the communal bathroom. So did the other lodgers and often as she was sitting in the bathtub, "a pea or a piece of carrot would float by." Floating bathtime vegetables have featured in her work. "There's also always a lot of weather in my books. I think weather is very important." She is also very good on smells.
She was born in Ottawa in 1939. When asked when she was born, she replies "Why? Are you trying to find out how old I am?" No. I knew the year. I just expected her birthday to fall on Hallowe'en. When I first met her on the publication of Cat's Eye she had been dressed in purple and had a witch like quality. She made you look for the broomstick, or at least a black cat. She laughs at being expected to have a birthday on October 31st. "No it's not. It's close though, November 18th. My sister was born on Hallowe'en."
Though majoring in English literature, later doing post graduate work at Radcliffe, she also studied chemistry at the University of Toronto and liked science. Her first novel, The Edible Woman was published in 1964. It coincided with the rise of feminism. Even now, Atwood asks "What exactly is feminism? I'd really like to know." Surfacing followed in 1972, Lady Oracle (1976), Lee Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1982). Her short story collections include Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard's Egg (1987) and Wilderness Tips (1991). There have also been 14 volumes of poetry. A shrewd, careful reader, Atwood wrote a controversial study of Canadian Literature in 1972 and has always been seen as a writer concerned about Canadian writing in general, not just her own work.
FOR all the manic humour of the early books, stories a bout panicking heroines battling against their weight, their mothers, their expectations and the silly men they have the ill luck to meet up with Atwood has always been extremely serious about her craft. She writes several drafts of a book and sends each work to a couple of outside, non professional readers before her publishers even see them.
The comedy continues, perhaps it has got sharper, more brittle, certainly blacker, at times quite surreal. And there has always been a distinct awareness of the essential difference between Canada and a foreign territory known as the United States.
In the story, Death By Landscape (From Wilderness Tips), Lois, the central character, now middle aged and widowed, remembering a friend who vanished forever one year at summer camp, recalls of the missing girl: "Lucy was from the United States, where the comic books came from, and the movies. She wasn't from New York or Hollywood or Buffalo, the only American cities Lois knew the names of but from Chicago. . . The only reason Lucy was being sent to this camp was that her mother had been a camper here. Her mother had been a Canadian once, but had married her father, who had a patch over one eye, like a pirate. She showed Lois the picture of him in her wallet. Her got the patch in the war. "Shrapnel", said Lucy. Lois, who was unsure about shrapnel, was so impressed that she could only grunt. Her own two eyed, unwounded father was tame by comparison.
THROUGHOUT her career to date, Atwood has always been very good on childhood. Nowhere is this stronger than in Cat's Eye - a powerful, moving portrait of a woman's life. Autobiograhical and extremely felt, it is the Atwood novel everyone should read. Elaine Risley, an artist approaching 50, returns to Toronto for a retrospective of a work and also reviews her past and present. For Elaine, childhood changed from happiness to terror when she becomes the target for a schoolgirl bully. "Until we moved to Toronto I was happy" she recalls. How long did it take to write? "Oh about 25 years, or a year and a half - depending on what way you look at it."
Although Atwood stresses "you mustn't write anything about my new book", it must be said that Alias Grace, her ninth novel, which will be published in September, is superb; black, funny, compelling and extraordinarily cleverly structured. Based on a real life 19th century murder case - nothing more may be said about it... until September.
Though a slow, deliberate speaker, she is a witty, ironic talker. Considered by many as a guru figure, she is certainly wise and has a reputation for being intimidatingly intelligent. Laughing loudly at this, she says, not very convincingly, "I'm not intelligent", pause, and she says with the delight of having made an important discovery. "It's because I have this long, thin, straight nose so they assume I'm intelligent."
