We’re all preoccupied with the future, but some are more preoccupied than others. Take Margaret Atwood, for example. Two years after completing her post-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy — and exactly three decades after her groundbreaking, fame-making foray into futurism with The Handmaid’s Tale — the iconic Canadian wordsmith (and longtime Annex resident) is offering us another peek at our possible destiny in The Heart Goes Last, which officially hits the shelves on September 29.
Fortunately, in this novel’s imagined society the human race has not been decimated by a global pandemic à la MaddAddam. Unfortunately, we’ve got a whole other set of dystopian problems on our hands.
The economy has collapsed, rule of law broken down, and cities are overrun with bands of looting thugs. Our married protagonists, Stan and Charmaine, are destitute and living in their car until they choose to take a gamble on free, gated community living.
But there are no free rides in life or in Atwood. This community operates on a time-share basis, with residents earning their stay at luxurious homes by doing alternating “shifts” as prisoners in the nearby for-profit prison. Like many a timeshare, the arrangement is not all it’s cracked up to be: the couple’s relationship unravels as their lives become entangled with their home-sharing “Alternates,” while the true, sinister sources of the prison system’s profits are revealed.
For a prophetess of gloom and doom, though, Atwood is pretty funny, both on the page and in conversation. The cultural and moral decay on display in The Heart Goes Last is trimmed with the absurd yet familiar trappings of early 21st-century culture.
“It’s hard to make things up that other people haven’t thought of,” says Atwood citing the very real existence of headless chickens (“They’re working on that; sorry to inform you”) and sex robots (“They’re making great strides with those; a couple of years ago they were kind of clunky, but now they’re quite refined”) as proof that her novel’s bizarre, irreverent parade of dystopian apparitions is closer to fact than fiction.
Arguably, since we don’t yet have voluntary imprisonment on a time-share basis, Atwood is still making things up, using an irrepressible writerly imagination that is constantly drafting the hereafter.
Not only is this her third book in as many years, but also she just participated in the Future Library project as the first of 100 authors to contribute an as-yet-secret text to be published a century from now. That’s when a dedicated forest of saplings will have grown enough to be used as printed paper for the Future Library anthology.
“I’m not allowed to say whether it’s a novel, a single word, a poem, a short story, a non-fiction,” Atwood says, savouring the intrigue of her secret story. “It has to be made of words and those can be any number of words, with no images, but I can’t tell you what’s in it.” It’s hard not to speculate about the time period of her piece, titled Scribbler Moon — did she look ahead to 2114 when the piece will first be read? A hundred years beyond that? Or perhaps back into the past?
Atwood’s not budging. “You’re not going to get me to tell you so give up now. Several people have tried to get this out of me. I’m just like a clam. I haven’t told anybody.”
Some more short-term plans are, however, up for discussion. Atwood’s next novel is an adaptation of The Tempest, as part of the Hogarth Press project that asks writers to choose one of the Bard’s works and rewrite it in novel form. As she plots out her own rendition of Shakespeare, Atwood is drawing inspiration from Jeanette Winterson’s soon-to-be-released The Gap of Time.
“Jeanette chose The Winter’s Tale, and it is very clever and engaging, so I can recommend it,” Atwood says. “It’s a rather improbable plot, but she manages it very well. Stolen babies, misplaced identities, a person you thought was dead comes back to life, those things we like.”
Also on the list of things Atwood likes is politics. She has been very vocal about her disdain for the Harper government, especially as we trundle toward the election. She published a satirical think piece opining on candidates’ hair (and outing Harper’s pileous preoccupation — he travels with a personal grooming assistant), which was apparently so inflammatory that it was first pulled from the web and then republished.
The light tone of the piece belied Atwood’s anger at how the country is being governed.
“Our dollar is joined at the hip to oil,” she declares. “That’s why the Canadian dollar is so low. What our money went into is increasingly being spoken of as a stranded asset, so it’s an asset you have, but you can’t capitalize on it. When you start adding up how much taxpayer money was invested and how much went into lobbying, we were getting back a negative amount. If we had not made such a big investment there, we would not be paying a bajillion extra dollars of interest on our ginormous debt!”
Although as a Canadian she clearly has a stake in the game, Atwood will not make predictions on the election outcome.
“I’m a novelist and Shakespeare’s the guy,” she says enigmatically. “We like to watch how character influences a person’s behaviour. Character is destiny and we already know about the character of one of these people.…”
While we all wait for destiny to take hold, Atwood will continue to engage her audience of readers — and 880K Twitter followers — in discussions, both political and literary. If you live in the Annex, you may be lucky enough to catch her writing in a local café. (She won’t say which one, maybe because she suspects you’ll want to engage her in discussions, both political and literary.)
She does confess that she likes to do interviews in the Bar Mercurio across from the Bata Shoe Museum, and surely an eager fan has eavesdropped on a conversation or two, but Atwood is clearly prudent in what she discloses. You’ll just have to read the book.
