KEY POINTS:
Atwood's collection of essays - first written for radio and before the current financial meltdown - is, needless to say, topical. However, as she says at the book's beginning, this isn't about national debt or debt management, but debt as a human construct, "thus an imaginative construct - and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear."
As that heady sentence suggests, it is quite academic, an exploration of debt as a metaphor, as it has been played out in history, myth, religion, folklore, philosophy and literature, not just financial debt, but debts to society, debts of honour, etc.
The first chapter focuses on our sense of fairness, without which our elaborate systems of debt and credit wouldn't exist, a drive we apparently share with primates. A study of capuchin monkeys taught to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber were happy with their lot until some monkeys were given grapes instead of cucumber slices, infuriating the cucumber-receiving capuchins so much they began throwing their pebbles out of their cages.
In the following chapters she explores the notion of debt and sin (as debt was often seen in Christianity) and debt and plot (as a leitmotif in Western literature). "When I was young and simple," writes Atwood, "I thought the 19th century novel was driven by love but now, in more complicated riper years, I see that it's also driven by money ... no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved idealistically aloft." In the past, unpaid debt landed people in prison, and sometimes still does, although these days most Western people can take a more civilised route and file for bankruptcy. In the past, debtors with their back against the wall often went and killed the creditors; unpaid debt is behind untold massacres throughout history.
The Christian resentment of Jewish moneylenders is most famously captured in The Merchant of Venice through the character Shylock, but how much of a villain was he really? As Atwood asks, "how to play Shylock, now that the interest charging for which he's despised and reviled has become standard business practice?" At a national level, taxation is really just a government borrowing money off people which it then is supposed to repay through the provision of services.
But many hefty tax schemes have been launched on the back of a galvanising war (the Napoleonic Wars, the US Civil War and, in Canada at least, the first World War) and remain in place after the war is over, while many rebellions have started because the taxes were too high. Atwood is a terrific writer, but she does veer off in all directions. This allows her to showcase her remarkable erudition, but can leave her readers lagging behind - at least this one.
It all leads, in the end, to the final chapter in which she evokes a Nouveau Scrooge, forced to witness the havoc our grasping species has wrought on the planet as well as grim predictions of the future. It's playfully done, although the spirit guiding Scrooge through this destructive journey sounds very much like a Green Party spokesperson, or perhaps Jared Diamond.
It's the least successful of chapters, from a writing point of view, but probably its most relevant: we're reaping what we've sown, and it's payback time.
Payback: Debt and the shadow side of wealth
By Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury $35)
* Margo White is an Auckland reviewer.
