Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

The acclaimed author offers up invaluable insights and fascinating life lessons.

1. Anger has to go somewhere

Margaret says she can’t really know whether the impetus for writing The Handmaid’s Tale was art or anger. But one thing she does believe is that if anger is an impetus, and a propelling “rocket fuel”, then “the anger has to go somewhere. And for some people it goes into action; for other people it goes into art; for some people it goes into both.”

In Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, which is about writing and why we write, she states, “Watch out for the Zeitgeist - it is not always your friend.” How then, one audience member asks, do we survive a dangerous zeitgeist?

The author’s response is simple: keep living. “If you can keep alive long enough,” she says, “it will change. We try out ideas and then they don’t work the way we thought they should, and then there’s a revision of how those ideas should work. And that’s just the way we go on.”

3. Fiction allows us to test things out

“Storytelling is one of the oldest human technologies we have,” the writer says, and fiction is a valuable tool because it “allows you to try out” something “without actually having to do it.”

She thinks, “probably it was a big educational tool amongst earlier human beings because you could say to children, for instance, this is gonna to be a story about how your uncle Jim got devoured by a crocodile right over there, and then you tell a gruesome tale and the child is not going to go swimming there. They don’t have to test it out” themselves.

In fiction, utopias and dystopias – like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale – “are ways of testing out possible arrangements of society without actually having to do them.”

The Handmaid Tale’s narrator, Offred, isn’t as rebellious as protagonists in some other dystopian novels, like 1984 or Brave New World. But, Margaret says, that’s because she is a single individual, isolated from other possible underground movements and, as in real life, “you have to take totalitarianism seriously.”

There were counter movements within Nazi Germany but “those people all got caught and they were executed.”

When she was writing the book the author herself went to East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland, all of which were still behind the iron curtain, and “you had to be very careful who you talked to and you didn’t know who to trust” – informers were everywhere.

5. Developments in biotechnology could change our society

When asked whether there are there things on the horizon in science or technology that either excite or terrify her, the writer gives the example of recent developments in “biotechnology in particular.”

We “can make embryos out of skin cells” which, she says, could lead to a society where we are all women, or where women are no longer needed! Thankfully, she says, “They haven’t got the glass bottles yet. We’re not yet in Brave New World.”

When asked whether she believes a Gilead-like society is more or less likely in the West since she wrote the book, she states, “It’s not likely in England, because you did it already in the 17th Century” and “you had your religious wars and you had Oliver Cromwell and then you didn’t like it and you had the restoration.”

But, she says, “The United States has never done that. They’ve had civil war, but it wasn’t a religious war. So it’s more likely in the United States.”

But even then, though there might be a return to traditional values and a “lie down on the floor and let me put my foot on your head” approach, it’s “unlikely under a religious banner. Much more likely under a sort of revisionist pseudo-biological weirdo thing.”

7. The future is not pre-determined

Just like in The Handmaid’s Tale, modern-day America is experiencing a decline in fertility rates. As James Naughtie says, this has led some people who are reading the book now, many decades after it was written, to say that Margaret Attwood is, “for good or ill, some kind of prophet.”

The author is quick to respond: “I’m not a prophet because there is no ‘the future’… There are an infinite number of possible futures, and the one that we get is going to depend on… how we behave now – but you’re not doomed to just one of them.”

Listen to The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s powerful and hugely anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.