Review: Vivien Horler

Book of Lives – A memoir of sorts, by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus)

It’s a mark of her literary fame that by far the biggest text on the cover is the author’s name, followed by the title and subtitle in much smaller type.

Margaret Atwood’s output has been prodigious – she has written more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays and won the Booker Prize twice – once for The Blind Assassin, and once shared it for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

She has been a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. Wikipedia tells us she is also an inventor – she came up with the concept of the LongPen, described as “a remote robotic writing technology” device, helpful for book signings. She cooks, she knits, has done various crafts, has been a wife and long-term partner, a stepmother, mother and grandmother.

She is also an unabashed name-dropper, but when you have lived as long as she has (she will be 87 this year), travelled the world and hobnobbed with the great and the good, you realise it’s not so much name-dropping as referring to good friends. Many of these are Canadian, of whom I’ve never heard, but this memoir is none the less for that.

You can read her entry on Wikipedia for a list of achievements, awards, themes and interests, but of course there is none of the warmth, the acerbity, the wit and the sheer humanity that comes across in Book of Lives.

Right at the beginning of this volume, in a series of epigraphs, she quotes an exchange between her mother, herself and her daughter Jess. Her mother says: “You were such a sensitive child!” She responds: “But I’m quite flinty now.” And her daughter adds: “Yes. You are.”

Another is from her partner of over 40 years, Graeme Gibson, who once told Jess: “If she’d never met me, your mother would still have been a successful writer, but she wouldn’t have had as much fun.”

We read about her backwoods childhood – her father was an entomologist and the family lived in remote regions of Canada – and how she started attending school regularly only when she was 12. At 16 she decided she wanted to be a professional writer.

She attended the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, and later won a fellowship to Harvard’s Radcliffe College, where she graduated with an MA.  She was interested in Victorian writing as well as myths, legends and fairytales.

But I’m listing, like Wikipedia does, and giving no flavour of the woman.

In her introduction she speaks of her affection for clothes, her famously curly unruly hair (she was once asked at a reading: “Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?”), and talks about writing. In a reference to the story of Snow White, she tells us that every writer knows it is the wicked queen, not Snow White, who has the best scenes.

“And every writer also knows that without the wicked queen, or her avatars – the alien invasion, the hurricane, the marriage-breaker, the sinister assassin, the snakes on a plane, the killer in the country house – there is no plot.”

She tells us every writer is two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. The pair share a memory and even a wardrobe, but they are not the same. “The one doing the writing has access to everything in the memory bank. The one doing the living might have some idea of what the writing self has been up to, but less than you’d think.”

She has written so many acclaimed, prize-winning and beloved books it’s hard to know where to start in a review of this hefty 500-plus page volume. The genesis of many of her best-loved works of fiction are included, and I thought of looking at just one, The Handmaid’s Tale.

First, the title. The working title had been Offred, the name of the protagonist, but it was later changed, partly in homage to Geoffrey Chaucer, and also as it seemed to be such a “tall tale”.

Atwood writes: “It did seem like a tall tale, back in 1984 – surely the United States was the leader of the democratic Free World. But now, not so tall.”

In 1981 the concept of a novel – a future US totalitarian theocracy – seemed “too weird, even for me”. Yet the idea percolated.

That same year, at a party, an old friend asked Atwood whether she knew the religious right was on the rise as a political force in the US. “Was I aware that they wanted to shove all women back into ‘the home’? Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?

‘How do they intend to stuff them in there?’ I mused. ‘Now that women have jobs and money of their own?’ Simple answer. Remove the jobs and money.”

As the Taliban has done in Afghanistan.

We discover that all the buildings in The Handmaid’s Tale are based on buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Atwood studied at Radcliffe, and that all the Aunts in the novel were named after products aimed at women, such as Aunt Sarah who was named after Sara Lee baked desserts.

Then Atwood asked herself: “If the United States were to have a totalitarian dictatorship, what form would it take? What flag would be waved? I decided that it would be a supposedly Christian theocracy, with the Bible altered and quoted to suit the aims of the regime. I add that core Christianity has nothing to do with the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale: No loving your neighbour like yourself, no doing unto others, no kingdom of God is within. Just plain old self-righteous power-hunger and repression.”

In early 1984 Atwood, Graeme and Jess spent some time in West Berlin after Atwood was invited on an academic exchange. They visited East Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and pre-Solidarity Poland.

“Surely I sensed the resentment, the spirit of rebelliousness, the desire to break free that must have been simmering and about to come to a boil when the Iron Curtain fell? They have asked about The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘Why didn’t they protest, and have marches, and go on strike?’ It’s the same answer: Anyone who asks these questions doesn’t understand totalitarianisms. Totalitarianisms squash any sign of resistance. The operative word is total.”

In early 1985 Atwood made a new friend, the novelist Valerie Martin. She asked Martin to become the manuscript’s first reader because she was worried: “Surely I would be accused of being anti-Christian, an evil feminist and a heretic re: the religion of America, land of democracy.”

Atwood told her friend she thought she was going to get into trouble.

Martin replied: “I think you’re gonna make a lot of money.”

In 2017, four months after Donald Trump had begun his first presidential term, the TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale was launched.

Atwood comments: “Given this context, some found the show too painful to watch – this wasn’t a fantasy, this might really happen. An armed attack on Congress still looked a little far-fetched – we’d have to wait until January 6, 2021 to see that – but the evaporation of women’s rights seemed all too probable.”

And in the light of remarks by people like Vice President JD Vance, Defense (War) Secretary Pete Hegseth and others appointed in Trump’s second term, it does all seem terrifyingly prophetic.

This memoir is poignant, enlightening and endlessly fascinating. The “flinty” Atwood is a delight to read.