Oct 7, 2009
Today 10-7: Margaret Atwood in Seattle
By: MattBriggs Categories: Today
{ Margaret Atwood, 10/7, Town Hall }
Margaret Atwood reads tonight at Town Hall from her novel The Year of the Flood, which expands on her apocalyptic 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. This is the first time that Atwood has revisited a novel. She had this to say about why:
When Oryx and Crake came out, it seemed to many like science fiction–way out there, too weird to be possible–but in the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world?[*]
Atwood writes great novels, such as Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale, whose characters tend to display an inner chilliness or distance, or else she doesn’t allow us to feel empathy for her characters. In her often perfectly executed short stories (such as Wilderness Tips) this can have the unfortunate effect of narratives that seem to be produced by a machine like die-cast spoons, buttons, or license plates. In a novel this chilliness has time to be placed into context and I usually find myself won over.
Writing this now about characters, I find myself getting drawn into what can sometimes be a vague discussion of character and novels. At one extreme the idea of a chilly character is completely abstract; characters are things made of words, and words do not have a temperature. At the other extreme, a character is a kind of living, breathing person who is somehow (magically!) contained between the covers of a book. If it is a given these are two extreme views on the same figure that is a character in fiction, I’ll take the middle-view, which still leaves that a character is made out of words and yet suggests a living breathing person. I am drawn mostly to reading stories and short stories with characters that create empathy, even if I don’t identify with them or find them repulsive. Oryx and Crake’s protagonist, Snowman, as the seemingly only survivor of the end world allowed empathy even though I doubt most anyone identified with him. I did identify with the fantasy of being the last person on earth, but I could feel empathy for his situation, and his struggle to remember the world before the end of the world.
Oryx and Crake reversed the ending of the end of the world story. Instead of a purely negative force of destruction overwhelming the planet, such as global warming, nuclear holocaust, endless war, instead, an excessively positive force of destruction overwhelms the planet. The possibilities of life are magnified by genetic engineering. After an engineered epidemic wipes out the earth, it leaves the remains of the old life and world festering with new life.
