Margaret Atwood: A mistress of multiple meaning

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Who's afraid of Margaret Atwood?

Quite a few people, if you can believe what you read. The word on the Booker Prize winning author from Toronto is that she is glacial.

She has been called the "high priestess of pain," an authority on "malevolence." Or else she is funny. Or bossy, in a playful sort of way.

When she entertained an Australian journalist to breakfast this year in a Toronto cafe, she ordered for her.

"I would like," she said, "a freshly squeezed orange juice, and so would you. Then I would like a cappuccino, and so would you. And then I would like a toasted bagel, and so would you."

The journalist drew the line at the bagel. Atwood, she reported, looked "perplexed and rather thrilled, as if it is rare and fascinating for someone to say no to her."

If not the high priestess of pain, Atwood is certainly the high priestess of Canadian literature.

Her first book, The Edible Woman, was published in 1970; her latest, the Booker Prize winner, The Blind Assassin, last year. In between are more than 30 volumes of poetry, fiction and children's books. The list of her awards ranges from the Swedish Humour Association's International Humorous Writer Award to the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. She was shortlisted for the Booker three times before winning it this time around.

The hitherto elusive Booker means a great deal to her ... "That I won't have to do it again."

Atwood, wry and, yes, funny, is in an Auckland hotel restaurant on a sweltering day looking cool and ethereal. Everything about her - including her conversation which ranges from Woody Allen to the Illiad - floats effortlessly and elegantly.

She is dressed in white with a dash of turquoise, her pale and pointed face framed by unruly curls. She looks faintly mischievous.

And she started this talking about clothes, by the way. She is ticking off, outfit by outfit, what she wore to the four Booker Award nights. For the first, when she was up against Kingsley Amis, who won, she went wearing a not-quite-big enough piece of stretchy sequined material which she pinned up to make a perilously skimpy top.

From anybody else, this would constitute banal chit-chat. From Atwood it is quite genuinely fascinating; she has always been good on rich descriptions of the domestic life. But still, I do have to ask, why are we talking about this?

"Because," she says, "sometimes it's the only possible thing to think about on these occasions." Whether she means on the occasions of big award ceremonies, or occasions like talking to journalists is not clear.

Margaret Atwood is the mistress of multiple meaning. Ask her, for example, what, or who, is the assassin of The Blind Assassin, and she will tell you what other people have suggested: time, love, jealousy. What she will not tell you is what she thinks. She is, after all, just the writer of the fiction. It is your job to read it.

Between Atwood's fictional narrators and the woman who controls the voice of those narrators from behind her keyboard is an ambiguity of the sort usually attributed only to celebrity actors.

One male reader was convinced that her 1983 science fiction novel The Handmaid's Tale, where the only role for women was as chattels or breeding stock, was autobiographical.

"But," protested Atwood, "it's set in the future." To no avail. The reader was adamant that "you could not have written about this unless something like it had happened to you."

It is a trick she finds herself falling for. There are, she says, a couple of stories by C. K Stead about a Canadian poet.

"And I found myself thinking 'I wonder which Canadian poet that would be?' Knowing perfectly well that it's a fictional Canadian poet. It's a compliment to the writer. It means that your magic tricks, the magic illusion, that you have done has been convincing."

A biography which would separate the real Atwood from the fiction is still to come. Atwood has not read the two already written. "I understand they're really boring." Also: "You'd just get too annoyed. Because I know the truth and they don't. Really they should wait until you're dead, and a lot of other people are dead, and then they could go to town."

Atwood has been adopted, from the time of her early novels, as an icon of feminism.

At the age of 61, she is comfortable with the feminism tag only "if people explain to me what they mean by that word."

Her own definition has as its starting place putting a diverse group of people together and asking of them a series of basic questions. Like: Are women human beings? Should women be able to read and write?

Most people do not have any problem answering yes to such questions. The questions are a little stickier when you start asking about, for example, abortion.

"But on anything else, they vote for the feminist side."

Oddly, for a feminist icon, she has said that she is more interested in writing about women because she knows less about them.

She grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, the child of a mother who was a tomboy and who loved riding horses and hated housework. When she and her brother played with dolls, it was not to dress them up and push them around in prams - they played war games with them instead.

Yet women seem to believe that she knows a great deal about them.

"Well, it's like the Tarot of the I Ching. People think themselves into it. They see their own experiences, or like what you've described, and they think that you know them. Of course you don't."

She says she has no idea what descriptions of herself like "high priestess of pain" actually mean. But she is and well knows it, an accomplished conjurer of painful emotion.

With deceptive casualness, she writes in The Blind Assassin: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge ... Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens."

She warns that preconceptions about a writer can muddy our reading of the writer. Kafka, whose work we think of as bleak and nightmarish, thought that what he wrote was hilariously funny, she says. "He used to laugh his head off reading it to his friends."

You can imagine Atwood reading out descriptions of herself to her friends and laughing her head off.

The glacial Ms Atwood? Indeed she is. In the sense that a glacier on a hot day can be a cool and refreshing thing to encounter.