A twist in the tale

A scene from the Handmaid's Tale
12 April 2012
The Weekender

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The question all readers of The Handmaid's Tale want to ask its Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is: "How did you know?" Her 1986 best seller, set in a futuristic totalitarian regime called the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, has chilling prescience: Christian fundamentalists have seized control and imposed repressive laws, brainwashing women and depriving them of all the rights they have spent the past 1,000 years securing - education, property, freedom to give birth when and via whom they choose.

The book, already translated into 35 languages and a regular A-level and university set text, was turned into a film starring Natasha Richardson, with a script by Harold Pinter. Tonight an operatic version of this dark fable, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders and British librettist Paul Bentley, receives its first UK performance at the Coliseum, having been premiered to rapturous reviews in Copenhagen three years ago.

Atwood, in London for the occasion, dreads the prospect of sitting through the opera a second time, nerve-rackingly magnificent though she found it first time round. She enthusiastically supports the piece, both music and libretto. Yet she finds it shocking as a theatrical experience, not least, perhaps, because in the first few minutes you see faked newsreel of fundamentalist troops invading the White House and blowing up the Statue of Liberty.

To underline contemporary parallels, English National Opera's publicity material shows a woman, naked and heavily pregnant, prone on an unfurled Stars and Stripes, observed by a helmeted soldier.

"There's nothing new in The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood says. "One of my rules was that I couldn't put anything into the novel that human beings hadn't actually done. Stories exist within the world. They're not on some other planet called literature or the moon." Small, droll, benignly austere, Atwood hardly strikes you as a Cassandrine figure. Only her startling eyes, clear blue, slightly exotic and almond shaped, hint at some far-seeing otherness.

She wrote the book in Berlin in 1984 - inspired, in part, by George Orwell's own study of dystopia set in that year, together with other literary models from Plato forward - little realising that within five years the Wall would have fallen and the Soviet regime collapsed. Then came the rise of the Taliban, the attack on the World Trade Center, and now Iraq.

"In fact I'd nearly started writing it some years earlier but the idea seemed too nutty. Who, in the early 1980s, was thinking such events could happen? And I'd put it all into a location where you wouldn't expect such things: Puritan North America, where my ancestors came from. One of my forebears was Mary Wesley, hanged for being a witch, except that when they cut her down she was still alive. Half-hanged Mary they called her. She's been a role model for me."

The critical and public response to The Handmaid's Tale differed dramatically in the three countries with which Atwood is most closely associated." In England it sold quite well at first - around 3,000 copies. Then it was short-listed for the Booker and sold a few more. The general critical response was 'what a jolly good yarn', and that was the end of the matter. You'd had Oliver Cromwell and religious war. You wouldn't expect it to happen again. In Canada, instead, people asked, 'Could it happen here?'

"Well, no, probably not, because of Canada's history and its disparate elements. Only in America did people ask, in utter seriousness, 'How long have we got?' They realised that they were closest of all to the real thing, especially compared to Europe, which is now so much more secular a place than the States."

Nor does Atwood flinch from repeating her warnings to anyone who will listen. A piece on Napoleon, published in the US and UK weeks before the bombing of Iraq, analysed his two biggest mistakes. "One was going into Spain and believing the Spaniards would welcome him with flowers in the streets when, instead, there was guerrilla uprising. The second was invading Russia when he did not have to, getting to Moscow and thinking he'd won. But then the Russians turned round and burned Moscow. The Iraqis have not filled the streets with flowers ..." Atwood's voice trails off. "People always believe they're doing what they're doing for the best. Even Stalin, even Saddam, even Hitler.

"Blair tried hard with the United Nations. I feel sorry for him. You could write a tragic Shakespeare play about him. We've had the first three acts. We're now in Act IV and the messengers are arriving with bad news. But he's not Richard III, he didn't start out as a villain. He's more Oedipus - not seeing, but acting out of the best intentions to cure the plague."

Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood is prodigious in her output, running to around 30 books in all genres. After being short-listed three times, she won the Booker for The Blind Assassin in 2000. Her writing has a cool, crystalline precision, virtuosic in its handling of metaphor and knotty structure, grand in scope and seriousness.

In contrast to William Styron's Sophie's Choice, another contemporary novel recently turned into an opera (with middling success), The Handmaid's Tale has a ghostly, suggestive quality, with much left unanswered. This lends itself surprisingly well to operatic setting, Atwood says.

"Because so much of it uses internal monologue, it actually works better as opera than as film. In cinema, unless you use voice-over, it's hard to convey that what someone is saying may not be what they are thinking.

"In opera you can have soliloquies. Characters can come forward on stage and say things the rest of the cast can't hear. And a sextet or trio, even when you can't hear all the words, is an accepted way of allowing you into the minds of the characters. [Ruders and Bentley] have found a very effective way of disentangling the different layers of the book. Someone asked me the other day how they ended the opera and do you know I've completely forgotten."

Atwood's new novel, Oryx and Crake, again set in the future, is to be published by Bloomsbury next month. She calls it "the book-end" to The Handmaid's Tale. "It opens with a man living in a tree and wearing a bed sheet - a filthy one. I won't say any more, except that compared with Handmaid's Tale, it's worse, much worse." She says this with a hint of glee, before embarking again on the current state of the US.

"American presidents are too close to being kings. You can't get rid of them for four, sometimes eight years. In Canada the prime minister doesn't embody the state, only the government. Now what I really think is that Prince Charles should be king of America. He's very popular there. I think they'd be doing him a favour.

"They could have an elected prime minister and Charles could go smashing champagne bottles over ships and choosing the dinnerware for the White House. I'm very keen on his biscuits. You're laughing? But they're organic, ahead of the time. His biscuits are the way of the future."

Margaret Atwood, in dry Canadian, plays a good hand of conversational poker.

  • The Handmaid's Tale opens tonight at the Coliseum (020 7632 8300) and continues in rep until 2 May.

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