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The queue in front of the Stein auditorium is daunting. Near the doorway, there’s a yellow sign with blue lettering, and a picture of a smiling Margaret Atwood standing with her arm crooked at the elbow and her fingers bent, poised in the air near her shoulder. Atwood has stopped over on her way back from Jaipur, and by the looks of it, the entire segment of the reading population of Delhi that didn’t make the pilgrimage to the Lit Fest is here. It’s a grey day, and there’s the merest hint of a breeze in the air. People keep emerging from around corners of buildings and joining the queue.
I chose not to travel to Jaipur for the Lit Fest even though several friends were going. Something about the scale and prestige of it put me off. Which is not to say I may not wind up there next year once I’m done being lofty and different from the average literature student. And I’m told that happens sooner than later. There would be too much celebrity on display, I told myself, too much of a crowd. I did not want to be one of the awestruck thousands, winding my way through tent after tent, an itinerant autograph collector, a slack-jawed carrier of inscrutable signatures.
But this is different. This is Atwood alone in Delhi. This will be more intimate, more focussed, more special. I am already greedy for insight, anticipating some stunning personal revelation. So what is it that I expect to see today? I’m about to turn a writer into a performing artist (just as any Lit Fest audience might), demand that she have as much stage presence and skill with public speaking as anyone trained in the art. I want to believe that brilliance and amazing literary prowess will be showcased in what I see of Atwood for the next hour. The irrationality of this has not yet occurred to me. I want to admire the complete Margaret Atwood package, such as it is.
When I was about fourteen, in the throes of what I used to call “girl politics”, I read Cat’s Eye . I was morbidly captivated by the idea that the spectres and scars of the battles I was fighting then would haunt me forever. I was also won over by Atwood’s choppy, zany prose, by the metaphors that felt so farfetched and so apt at the same time. Then a year-and-a-half later, I read The Blind Assassin . Soon I read A Handmaid’s Tale . Oryx and Crake . Then Moral Disorder . Stone Mattress . About a month ago I bought a beautiful edition of Bluebeard’s Egg . I’m still making my way through those stories. They’re intense, atmospheric, witty. And as I watch and listen to her speak, I know that after today all the Atwood women I read about will have flat, sardonic voices and twinkling eyes.
We’re halfway through the evening and Margaret Atwood is laughing at something she just said. She has not disappointed. I love her sense of humour, her quirky anecdotes. I can feel it in my bones — the mind of the author is manifest here. This is no ordinary person. Patrick French looks nonplussed for a moment and then he joins in her merriment. In half a minute he tentatively poses the next question. He’s asking about her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last , and attempting to give a brief thematic overview (prisons for profit, corporatised lives). Atwood interrupts him: “The first thing that I want you to say about that book is that there are a lot of jokes in it.” She laughs again, and the whole auditorium laughs with her.
How important the tone is. Atwood’s novels and short stories are portraits of suffering, forecasts for disaster, and yet, no one can accuse them of being flat and gloomy. She never lets us lose sight of the sheer absurdity of human behaviour and thought. As human beings, we may be kind and intelligent, but we are also crude and hurtful, selfish and vindictive. And Atwood’s writing makes this truth seem less heart-breaking. Because it’s all expressed so cleverly, with such wry accuracy.
This is not to say that all suffering is best treated ironically. Suffering is explored at length and with intensity in Atwood’s books. Imagery can be grim and startlingly graphic, the product of deeply sorrowful and bitter protagonist minds. Atwood’s characters are often lonely, grieving, trapped in the shadow of some ghastly surreal memory, followed around by the ghost of some terribly destructive person from their past. She believes in writing about lives as people experience them, and therefore she is meticulous about describing the tricks our minds play on us. We are victims of our pasts, but the past exists only as the mind constructs it. Cordelia of Cat’s Eye is a real person whose adolescent cruelty has had a deep and lasting impact on Elaine Risley but through most of the novel she is not a physical presence. The emphasis is as much on Elaine’s mind and the power of memory as it is on Cordelia and the horrors of childhood. Atwood takes suffering seriously, but she also deliberately asks the question of how and why it arises.
Another question is posed: speculative fiction versus science fiction. What’s what? Science fiction, she is at pains to tell us, is that which is totally strange and impossible. “Another dimension of space… It’s a useful address. Anything you like can happen there. Spaceships and skin-tight uniforms, ray guns, Martians with the bodies of giant squids, that sort of thing [excerpt from The Blind Assassin ].” Speculative fiction, on the other hand, is the MaddAddam series, A Handmaid’s Tale , The Heart Goes Last : stories which are quite plausible and, considering the current trajectories of science and society, could well be our future.
What will be the consequences of taking our lives into our own hands? How closely can we shape ourselves and the world around us before we begin to lose our illusory sense of control? To me Atwood’s speculative novels are terrifying. I read them very slowly, putting them down every five or ten pages, because I can’t process the jumbled, twisted universe they describe. Decay, death, mutation, captivity, subjugation, survival. The stuff of life, really, but taken to an extreme, in a bid to make a point.
I have always felt that Atwood’s writing is intimidating. Her protagonists are brilliant, insightful, full of pithy observations. The women have similar voices, as if their minds are all pieces of a nebulous female consciousness that speaks, suffers and weeps as one. And this army of dissenting women is a scary idea in itself. It makes me want to join in the clamouring, but also warns that I must be articulate enough to do it justice. Atwood never inspires me to write, as a result. Only to read and to savour every word.
Patrick French has wound up the conversation. We have all come here for Atwood and it doesn’t strike me that the reason French has been looking a bit like a fish out of water this evening might perhaps be that he is exactly that — a fish out of water, a man outside his element. In theory, a writer belongs in a different realm. His world is the world of the written word. It is a vivid, wild world, but also a very private one. The process by which ideas, thoughts and images are translated into words is not easy to fathom, even for the writer himself. It has very little to do with the outward ability of a person to hold forth in complex interactive situations. Atwood is impressive, then, precisely because she seems to meet my expectations. She’s all flair and sass. And now that she’s spoken, I think I am privy to how her mind works.
Margaret Atwood is taking questions from the audience. Someone has just asked a very specific one about poetry and nomenclature, and I’ve tuned out. I haven’t read much of her poetry. Suddenly, the auditorium doors open and people start filing in, clutching copies of The Heart Goes Last and A Handmaid’s Tale — for autographs. I jump up with my copy of The Blind Assassin and join the queue. I’m ridiculously nervous. In about ten minutes, I’ve made it up onto the stage, and I’m three or four people away from the lovely wooden desk at which Atwood sits, a stiff smile on her face, and a pen in her hand. Up close, her skin is pale and shiny, her hair as silver as I imagined. I hear her spell out the letters of my name and I mumble something incoherent which stays caught in my throat. Someone takes a photo. Before I know it, the moment is over. I’m jumping off the stage and my friend is hustling me out of the auditorium. I stare at the scribbled message in my book, run my hands over the page. My copy of this book has always been one of my most prized possessions. I bought it in 2013 at Blossom Book House in Bangalore. The novel, when I first read it, felt like an epic, with the sweeping time frame and the scale of the tragedy it dealt with. The cover is the usual one, an illustration of Laura Chase, wearing a black dress with full sleeves and a plunging back, her lips red and her eyes somewhat expressionless. And now the title page bears the author’s signature. My journey as an autograph collector has begun.
My memories of that evening are collapsing back into the images I’ve always had of Atwood. My sense of having accessed something about who she is has faded already. I can recall the anecdotes, interesting biographical details, but they no longer seem like maps of a mind. So I turn to her books. The only words and lives that matter to the reader are contained within those books. Atwood slips into the recesses of my mind and Iris Chase-Griffen surfaces. My own story takes a break, and the novel takes over.
