also by margaret atwood

  NON-FICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

  Days of the Rebels: 1815–1840

  Second Words: Selected Critical Prose

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (republished as On Writers and Writing)

  Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004

  Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing

  Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983–2005

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

  In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

  NOVELS

  The Edible Woman

  Surfacing

  Lady Oracle

  Life Before Man

  Bodily Harm

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  Cat’s Eye

  The Robber Bride

  Alias Grace

  The Blind Assassin

  Oryx and Crake

  The Penelopiad

  The Year of the Flood

  MaddAddam

  The Heart Goes Last

  Hag-Seed

  The Testaments

  SHORTER FICTION

  Dancing Girls

  Murder in the Dark

  Bluebeard’s Egg

  Wilderness Tips

  Good Bones and Simple Murders

  The Tent

  Moral Disorder

  Stone Mattress

  POETRY

  Double Persephone

  The Circle Game

  The Animals in That Country

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie

  Procedures for Underground

  Power Politics

  You Are Happy

  Selected Poems: 1965–1975

  Two-Headed Poems

  True Stories

  Interlunar

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986

  Morning in the Burned House

  Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965–1995

  The Door

  Dearly

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  Angel Catbird

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  War Bears

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree

  Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse)

  For the Birds

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda

  Wandering Wenda

  COPYRIGHT © 2022 BY O.W. TOAD LTD.

  Hardcover edition published 2022

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771096402

  ISBN 9780771003929 (signed edition)

  Ebook ISBN 9780771096419

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgements to reprint previously published material appear on this page–this page.

  Cover design by Kelly Hill

  Cover art: (flames) CSA Images / Getty Images

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay, adapted for ebook

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  ep_prh_6.0_139338313_c0_r0

  To Graeme—

  And for my family

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: 2004 to 2009 | What Will Happen Next?

  Scientific Romancing

  Frozen in Time

  From Eve to Dawn

  Polonia

  Somebody’s Daughter

  Five Visits to the Word-Hoard

  The Echo Maker

  Wetlands

  Trees of Life, Trees of Death

  Ryszard Kapuściński

  Anne of Green Gables

  Alice Munro: An Appreciation

  Ancient Balances

  Scrooge

  A Writing Life

  Part II: 2010 to 2013 | Art Is Our Nature

  The Writer as Political Agent? Really?

  Literature and the Environment

  Alice Munro

  The Gift

  Bring Up the Bodies

  Rachel Carson Anniversary

  The Futures Market

  Why I Wrote MaddAddam

  Seven Gothic Tales

  Doctor Sleep

  Doris Lessing

  How to Change the World?

  Part III: 2014 to 2016 | Which Is to Be Master

  In Translationland

  On Beauty

  The Summer of the Stromatolites

  Kafka

  Future Library

  Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale

  We Are Double-Plus Unfree

  Buttons or Bows?

  Gabrielle Roy

  Shakespeare and Me

  Marie-Claire Blais

  Kiss of the Fur Queen

  We Hang by a Thread

  Part IV: 2017 to 2019 | How Slippery Is the Slope?

  What Art Under Trump?

  The Illustrated Man

  Am I a Bad Feminist?

  We Lost Ursula Le Guin When We Needed Her Most

  Three Tarot Cards

  A Slave State?

  Oryx and Crake

  Greetings, Earthlings! What Are These Human Rights of Which You Speak?

  Payback

  Memory of Fire

  Tell. The. Truth.

  Part V: 2020 to 2021 | Thought and Memory

  Growing Up in Quarantineland

  The Equivalents

  Inseparable

  We

  The Writing of The Testaments

  The Bedside Book of Birds

  Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death

  Caught in Time’s Current

  Big Science

  Barry Lopez

  The Sea Trilogy

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  Index

  Introduction

  Burning Questions is my third collection of essays and other occasional pieces. The first was Second Words, which began in 1960, when I started publishing book reviews, and ended in 1982. The second was Moving Targets, which gathered materials from 1983 to mid-2004. Burning Questions runs from mid-2004 to mid-2021. So, twenty years, give or take, for each volume.

  Each of these time periods has been tumultuous in its own way. Occasional pieces are written for specific occasions and are thus tightly connected to their own time and place—or at least mine are. They are also linked to my age at the time of writing, and to my outward circumstances. (Did I have a job? Was I a student? Did I need the money? Was I already a well-known writer, indulging my interests? Was I doing a freebie in response to a cry for help?)

  In 1960, I was twenty, single, unpublished in book form, and a female undergraduate of limited wardrobe. In 2021, I was eighty-one, a fairly well-known writer, a grandmother, and a widow, also of limited wardrobe, having learned through failed experiments that there are some things better left unworn by me.

  Naturally I have changed—my hair’s a different colour—but so has the world. The past sixty-odd years have been a roller coaster, with many shocks and upheavals, many uproars and reversals. The year 1960 was only a decade and a half after the end of the Second World War. To our generation, that war felt both very close—we’d lived through it, our families contained veterans and casualties, some of our high-school teachers had been in it—and very far away. Between 1950 and 1960 had come both McCarthyism, giving us a peek at the fragility of democracy, and Elvis, upending song and dance. The clothes too had changed radically: the 1940s were sombre, durable, military, boxy; the 1950s, frothy, strapless, bouffant, pastel, beflowered. Femininity was lauded. The cars had gone from the dark, enclosed sedans of the war years to chrome-trimmed convertibles in flamboyant colours. Transistor radios were among us. Drive-in theatres popped up. Plastics arrived.

  Then, in 1960, there was another change. Among the earnest young, folk songs replaced formal dances. In the tiny artistic circles that then existed in Toronto coffee houses—inclined as they were to French existentialism rather than Beatniks—black turtlenecks and equally black eyeliner were in vogue.

  Still, the early 1960s were the 1950s, in essence. The Cold War was on. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. There was no birth control pill generally available. Ther
e were no miniskirts, though there had just been short shorts. There were no hippies. There was no second-wave women’s movement. It was in this period that I wrote my first book reviews, my first collection of poems, my first novel—still in a drawer, happily—and my first published novel, The Edible Woman. By the time it came out—in 1969—the world it describes was already gone.

  The later 1960s brought uproar. The big civil rights marches in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, the hundreds of thousands of American draft dodgers pouring into Canada. I myself was constantly in transit: for some of these years I was a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts; for others I held minor academic positions in such places as Montreal and Edmonton. I moved sixteen or seventeen times. This period saw the formation of a number of new publishing ventures in Canada, many of them connected with the country’s post-colonial struggle to figure itself out. My involvement with one of them gave rise to much essay writing, both at the time and later.

  Then came the 1970s: the ferment of the second-wave women’s movement, followed by reaction and burnout toward the end; in Canada, Quebec separatism occupied the centre of the political stage. This period saw the arrival of several authoritarian regimes: Pinochet in Chile, and the Argentinian junta, with their murders and disappearances; the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, with its wholesale slaughters. Some were “right,” some were “left,” but no ideology, it was clear, had a monopoly on atrocities.

  I continued to write book reviews, as well as the novels, stories, and poems I felt were my real work, but I also branched out into articles and speeches. Quite a few of these were about subjects that still occupy my shrinking brain: “women’s issues,” writing and writers, human rights. I was now a member of Amnesty International, which worked to free “prisoners of conscience,” largely through letter-writing campaigns.

  By 1972, I had ceased to have academic jobs and had gone freelance, so I was taking any paid work I could pick up. We were living on a farm and had a small child as well as a small budget. We were not poor, though one visitor told people we had “nothing but a goat.” (No goats, in reality; they were sheep.) But we were not rolling in cash. We grew a lot of vegetables and kept chickens and other non-human residents. This mini-agribiz took time, and also lost money, so if I could make a bit of cash from writing rather than egg sales, all to the good.

  The 1980s began with our move from the farm to Toronto (for school reasons, among others), the election of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and the rise of the religious right. In 1981, I began thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale, though I put off writing it until 1984 because the concept seemed too far-fetched. My output of “occasional writing” sped up, partly because it could—with a child in school, I had more free time during the day—and partly because I was getting more requests. Looking back at my sporadic, badly kept, and not very informative journals, I note that one of the leitmotifs is a constant moaning about taking on too much. “This has to stop,” I find myself saying. Some of the pieces I was writing were in response to pleas for help, and so it has continued.

  “Just say no,” people told me and I told myself. However, if you’re asked to write ten occasional essays a year and say no to 90 per cent of them, that comes to one essay a year. But if you’re asked to write four hundred pieces and you still say no to 90 per cent of them—how firm and virtuous you are!—that’s still forty pieces a year. I’ve been averaging forty a year for the past couple of decades. There’s a limit. This has to stop.

  To resume our chronology: the Cold War and the Soviet system crumbled in 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down. The end of history had occurred, we were told: capitalism was the way forward, shopping was king, your lifestyle choices defined you, and what more could women want? Not to mention “minorities”—referred to in Canada among politicians and government bureaucrats, or so my spies told me, as “multi-eths” (people who spoke languages other than French and English) and “visi-mins” (people who were not “white”). They could both want quite a bit more, it was soon to become evident; but it was not very evident in the 1990s. There were stirrings, there were rumblings; there were wars and political coups and conflicts elsewhere; but there were not yet explosions. “It can’t happen here” was still the attitude.

  After 2001, with the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, everything changed. Former assumptions were challenged, former comforts flew out the window, former truisms were no longer true. Fear and suspicion were the order of the day.

  And that is where Burning Questions begins.

  * * *

  —

  Why the title? Possibly because the questions we’ve been faced with so far in the twenty-first century are more than urgent. Every age thinks that about its own crises, of course, but surely this era feels different. First, the planet. Is the world itself truly burning up? Is it we who’ve been setting fire to it? Can we put those fires out?

  What about the highly unequal distribution of wealth, not only in North America but virtually everywhere? Can such a top-heavy and unstable arrangement possibly last? How soon before the 99 per cent get fed up and set fire to the figurative Bastille?

  Then there’s democracy. Is it in peril? What do we mean by “democracy” anyway? Has it ever actually existed, in the sense of equal rights for all citizens? Are we serious about all? All genders, all religions, all ethnic origins? Is this system we call democracy worth preserving, or else pursuing? What do we mean by freedom? How much speech should be freely uttered, and by whom, and about what? The social media revolution has given unprecedented power to online conglomerations of people that are called “movements” if you like them and “mobs” if you don’t. Is this good or bad, or just an extension of old-fashioned crowds in motion?

  Does “burn it all down”—a popular slogan in our times—mean all, really?

  For instance, does all mean all words? What about “the creatives,” as some are in the habit of calling them? What about writers and writing? Are they—are we—to be mere mouthpieces, reeling out acceptable platitudes that are supposed to be good for society, or do we have some other function? If it’s a function of which others disapprove, shall our books be burned? Why not? It’s been done before. There is nothing inherently sacrosanct about a book.

  These are some of the burning questions I’ve been asked, and have asked myself, over the course of the past two decades. Here are some of the answers. Or should I say some of the attempts? That’s what essay means, after all: an attempt. An effort.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve arranged this book into five parts. Each is marked by an event or turning point.

  Part One begins in 2004. In the aftermath of the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks, the Iraq War was ongoing. I was still travelling for Oryx and Crake (2003), the first book of the MaddAddam trilogy, plotted around a double crisis: the climate crisis and species extinction precipitated by it and a pandemic plague enabled by gene splicing. In 2003–2004, these premises seemed remote; now, not so much. Part One ends in 2009, as the world was still staggering from the big financial crash of October 2008—the very moment at which I was publishing Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. (Some people thought I had a crystal ball. I didn’t.)

  Part Two runs from 2010 to 2013. In these four years Obama was the U.S. president, and the world was slowly recovering from the financial meltdown. I was mostly occupied with the writing of MaddAddam, the third novel in the MaddAddam trilogy. Once you’ve published a book, you are often asked why you did it—as if you’ve stolen an ashtray—and you will find me, in one of these essays, dutifully trying to account for my crime.

  My essay-writing life was varied. I continued to produce reviews, introductions, and, unfortunately, obituaries. The climate crisis was becoming an ever-hotter topic, and I found myself writing about it more often.

  In 2012, my partner, Graeme Gibson, was diagnosed with dementia. “What’s the prognosis?” he asked. “It will go slowly, it will go quickly, it will stay the same, or we don’t know,” he was told. It was much the same with the state of the world. It was a restless, unsettled period, without any single overwhelming catastrophe. People were fearful, but their fear was unfocused. We were holding our breath. We were carrying on. We were pretending things were normal. But whiffs of a change for the worse were already in the air.