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Margaret Atwood's latest novel, Oryx and Crake, is not, she insists, "science fiction" but "speculative fiction". It is a distinction she has also made about her earlier dystopian book, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), currently being staged as an opera in London.
"Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen," she explains. Her work is always researched: Oryx and Crake, a novel blending a biological apocalypse with a genetically engineered genesis, acknowledges a number of personal debts in terms of research and background, but also scrupulously offers a list of documentary sources at a web address.
"We have a big box, called The Brown Box... it's a brown cardboard box - in which all the research clippings are filed: so there's nothing I can't back up," says Atwood. Nor are her researches limited to the cutting edge of contemporary genetics: her 1979 novel, Life Before Man, set partly in the dinosaur department of a natural history museum, received a positive review in a paleontological magazine ("I was flattered. I like to get things right").
Her interests are broad: "Pop science - usually life sciences - is my casual reading," she laughs; "I don't have to review it or have an opinion, I can just read it for fun." Military history is another: in recent weeks, she wrote a not untopical newspaper article on "Napoleon's big mistakes", of which she remarks, "I think there probably are lessons; you can 'win' but it's very difficult to hold a country of people who hate you".
Against punctiliously rendered backgrounds, human dramas are played out. Atwood's characters, like Tony in The Robber Bride (1993), a military historian, or Lesje, the classifier of fossils in Life Before Man, find their passions are not sufficient as a defence against the messy emotional entanglements of human beings. Lesje "knows that scientific objectivity is a fraud... She knows that the passion for science is like any other passion."
Atwood's novels frequently involve emotional archaeology: her characters are presented to us at some point of crisis: flashbacks sketch out the family histories and adult situations that have led them to those crises (she took a university course on the Bildungsroman ). But she has an abiding contempt for biographical literary criticism and is famed for her irritation or playfulness when presented with crasser readings of her life through her work, or vice versa.
"I think it is true sometimes; usually you only call on it when you come to a part in the work that's not explicable in terms of the work - you think 'why are they doing this?' I used to be completely uninterested in biographies. I've become somewhat more interested in them but often they're interesting not because the person was a writer but because they did other things; and with some people there's nothing to say. I mean, they wrote - and that was it. A lot of biographers hate their subjects, and then they're egged on by the publishers who say you have to give us some dirt or it won't be interesting: what people really want is a peek into the person's bathroom, and their dirty underwear, and what have you; it's gossip magazine stuff."
At the same time, in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), which helped to establish Canadian literature as a serious corpus rather than a contemptuous joke, she writes: "Part of where you are is where you've been. If you aren't too sure where you are, or if you're sure but don't like it, there's a tendency both in psychotherapy and in literature to retrace your history to see how you got there."
Atwood was born in November 1939, just after the start of the second world war. Her upbringing was unconventional. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist, and her mother, Margaret Dorothy Killam, was a former dietician and nutritionist. They were from Nova Scotia, "a province from which they felt themselves in exile all their lives". They met when "my father saw her sliding down a banister at Normal School [teacher-training college] and decided there and then that she was the girl he would marry".
Carl did not fight in the war but his expertise was vital: he ran a forest-insect research station in North Quebec, forestry being vital to the war economy. The family (Atwood has one brother, Harold Leslie, two years older; a younger sister, Ruth, was born much later, in 1951) would set off for the northern wilderness every spring, only returning in the autumn to one of a number of different cities. "At the age of six months," Atwood has written, "I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown."
Atwood and her brother had few children to play with, no television or cinemas, and a radio that was unreliable and used mostly to find out about the war. Books naturally became a central focus, as did imaginative games. Their mother would school them in the mornings; the rest of the day they had to themselves.
Atwood remarks, "They weren't very actively encouraging; I think their theory was to leave kids alone... I call that encouraging. The idea of parents hovering over you the whole time, making you take lessons and occupying every minute of your time, I think is probably quite bad, because it means the child has no room to invent. I did have this older brother who was very instructive, who liked passing on to me whatever information he'd acquired; it meant we didn't play dollies a lot; we'd line up our - few, I'd have to say, because it was the war, you know - our few stuffed animals and then we'd have the Battle of Waterloo."
Harold, now a professor of physiology and zoology at the University of Toronto, taught Margaret to read - "not deliberately, just in the process of life" - and to canoe and swim. They drew their own comics, with series and characters: in later life, Atwood would produce satirical cartoons for amusement, sometimes under a pseudonym. She developed an ease with and enjoyment in the outdoor life that persists.
She only attended full-time school at eight, in Toronto. Readers of Cat's Eye (1988), a chilling account of the lasting damage of childhood bullying, might expect that these years were problematic, but apart from a fleeting reference to "a horrific Grade 4 teacher" there is no suggestion that Atwood was especially unhappy, though she did recently write that "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls - their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten".
The main difficulty seems to have been adjusting, after the tomboyish freedoms of forest life, to a year-round desk-bound life. Her early years of winter school had "taught me that it's possible to go through the entire year's curriculum in a month". As a result, she advanced quickly, and there was an awkward period when she was in a class of much older children: "They shouldn't have done that. I was 12 in the first year of high school and there were people in my class who were 15-and-a-half."
She was tired a lot and developed a heart condition, inherited from her father, in which the heart beat is irregular, almost syncopated. Her verbal rendition of the rhythms is hard to transcribe, but these lines from one of her early poems, "Faulty Heart", capture it:
But most hearts say I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
. . . It says, I want, I don't want, I
want, and then a pause.
She claims to have realised at high school, while walking home across the football field, that she would be a writer: "I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do."
As yet unselfconscious, she announced her decision to schoolfriends (who later told her they thought she was "brave" to just come out with it) and were later to write in the high school yearbook that "Peggy's ambition is to write the Great Canadian Novel".
She also had to tell her parents: "I'm sure they were horrified when I announced that that's what I was going to do because nobody at that time in Canada could make any sort of living out of it. I thought - still a good thing to think- that I would have to have some other means of support, so I was quite prepared to have the day job and do the writing, which I did for years."
But another reason for her family's concern was perhaps that they are all scientists: "Well, they always kind of shook their heads and said 'oh, you should have gone on in botany': for the grade 13 exams, which determined whether we got into university; we had to take nine subjects, so I did take botany, zoology, chemistry. And yes, I'm afraid I was quite good at them!"
Atwood studied at the University of Toronto, taking a BA in English, while getting involved in drama, journalism and debating. She was also writing, "compulsively, badly, hopefully", and began to read her poems at a coffee house in Toronto called the Bohemian Embassy, where the arty crowd hung out.
Douglas Fetherling, a contemporary of Atwood's, recalled fondly in his memoir of the time that she had "a level of justified self-confidence I had never encountered before (her parents must have loved her from the moment of her birth), but I think loyalty was the most attractive of her many attributes... When Peggy was your friend, she was your friend for life (and what's more, in a world of impractical poets and artists, she was worldly-wise in the extreme)."
One of her lecturers was the legendary Northrop Frye, who encouraged Atwood to go to Harvard for postgraduate work, rather than pursue her writing career while starving in a garret. By this stage she had had her first poems printed in some of the few literary magazines in Canada at the time.
Years later she would recall that "nothing has since matched the thrill of opening the [first] acceptance letter". She got engaged to David Donnell, a poet, who also helped her to assemble the first chapbook of her poetry, Double Persephone (1961), though their engagement was broken off by May 1962. By then she was at Harvard, where she studied Puritan history under Alan Heimert. She also studied the literature of the American revolution.
"That was very interesting too; because there wasn't any. We studied before and after; but during the revolution they were too busy revolting to write anything. For me, as a Canadian, at a time when we were thought not to have any literature, it was very interesting to go back to a time in American history when they were thought not to have any, and there were people going about building it, and the great masterpiece - Moby-Dick - appeared and was immediately sneered at and scoffed at and dismissed: it wasn't resurrected until the 1920s."
In 1972, Atwood was to establish the contexts and themes of a specifically Canadian literature in Survival. Her 1996 novel Alias Grace was a fictionalised account of a notorious murder case she had first encountered when editing the journals of Susanna Moodie, an Englishwoman who had emigrated to Canada in the 19th century.
In Atwood's novels, topography is rendered with absolute fidelity: Toronto is the location for several of them, and, apart from an early draft of her first novel - where she invented the Canadian locations - when no one seemed to take Canadian-based fiction seriously, the roads, ravines and bridges are all identifiable. She has said: "The places in my novels are often real. The people and the experiences are imaginary," though this is, arguably, a trifle disingenuous.
Between two two-year stints at Harvard for a PhD she never finished, during which she continued to write and publish her poetry, she spent a year at Canadian Facts Marketing, which supplied the background for her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969).
She got engaged to James "Jay" Ford, a fellow student, in 1963, but by Easter the following year, she had broken it off, as a result of the stresses caused by his workload. She was subsequently courted by Jim Polk (an American writer she had met at Harvard) and, in January 1967, she decided to marry him "after five years of equivocation". Their wedding, in Montreal, had a faintly shambolic and surreal quality that would later inform the comical episode of Joan Foster's marriage ceremony in Lady Oracle (1976).
Throughout the 1960s, Atwood continued to write tirelessly, exhausting herself at one point and developing spinal neuritis. Her work was successful; she was a leading new poet in the anthology Poetry 1964, and in 1966, Contact Press published her first full-length collection of poems, The Circle Game. It won the prestigious governor general's award for poetry. When Atwood heard the news, she was still in Harvard. Her existing wardrobe was inadequate for the occasion, according to her flatmates. One did her hair for her, one lent her a dress, and they both made her buy new shoes: she only wore Hush Puppies, which, in her absence, her flatmates charitably burned.
As a result of the award, The Edible Woman was published. Atwood began to enjoy a growing reputation; nonetheless, while her own career took off, she still devoted considerable amounts of time to a small radical publishing house, Anansi, in which her husband was deeply involved. Over this period, Atwood and Jim Polk drifted apart, and Atwood began a relationship with the novelist Graeme Gibson. Together with Graeme's two teenage sons, Matt and Grae, they went off to a farm in a small agricultural community in 1973 in Alliston.
In May 1976, Atwood had a daughter, Eleanor "Jess" Atwood Gibson. As a result, they finally gave up the farming life, to spare Jess from "spend[ing] about four hours a day on the school bus. It was a shame: but on the other hand farming was a hell of a lot of work."
Atwood and Gibson remain an utterly devoted couple - when a female US novelist famously remarked that "every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson", Atwood cheerfully put the compliment on a T-shirt.
Her early literary success was welcomed by many, though she recalls having to deal with a lot of hostile interviews and reviews from men who, she says, felt threatened by the implicit feminism of the early books, and some jealousy of the prominence she had achieved in Canadian literature has been evident.
The novelist and humorist Will Ferguson was once asked to contribute a piece on Atwood for a feature about "celebrities Canadians love to hate"; he found it difficult and later commented that "Atwood has an image for being cool and aloof, perhaps, but she is still a respected figure among Canadians. Perhaps it is simply the 'tall poppy syndrome' in action - the notion that anyone who gets too high and mighty needs to be cut down in size..."
Although she never felt particularly tough compared with the rest of her family - "It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming" - Atwood now recognises that "I was certainly very scary to people in my 20s; I think younger women with talent are scary."
Some interviewers have commented on their anxiety when faced with Atwood's wit, irony and intelligence. The novelist Ali Smith, an admirer, says Atwood is "completely hawkily intelligent; she'll never let you off the hook; presumably people are scared of that, but, my God, it's refreshing and brilliant. She's an incredibly inspiring figure and she's one of the funniest, sharpest, truest people, and maybe that's why she's scary, because there aren't that many people who'll dare to be that."
Atwood remains both genuinely popular and also respected. The critic Alex Clark says: "What I admire in her novels is that, although subversion of genre is not uncommon these days, I think she does it in a very clever way: she makes the genre-busting stuff mirror the psychology of the characters. The genre she uses, and the way she subverts it, reflect aspects of those characters' own modes of constructing their reality or fictionalising their own existence."
When she finally won the Booker Prize with The Blind Assassin (2000) - the fourth time she was shortlisted - not everyone felt it was her best book, but few begrudged her an honour she had so evidently merited on so many occasions. Jasper Gerard, who interviewed Atwood at the time, complained about having "to wade through" a book "so heavy it is unpickupable", before unselfconsciously quoting Atwood on "the hired spitters" of the Booker's panel of television pundits.
Internationally established by the 1980s, Atwood no longer had to do other jobs to support herself; she and her husband were successful writers, and she a national icon, but nonetheless she threw herself into human-rights work, as well as some arts-related work - "do-goody blood-giving activities", she says, self-deprecatingly, blaming "the Brownies" for their early influence.
She had visited the West Indies in November 1980, staying in Saint Vincent. The stories she heard there inform her political thriller Bodily Harm , which she finished writing in February 1981; but also the haunting poem-sequence "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written", dedicated to Carolyn Forché, whom she'd met in Portland, Oregon in 1980, and who had energised her interest in the victims of torture and oppression. Atwood has done a lot of work for Amnesty and in 1984 she founded the Canadian English-speaking chapter of PEN.
That "do-goody" comment reminds one that several of Atwood's characters have been involved in charities and political groups, which are often deprecated by other characters. But this scepticism has not deflected Atwood from her own contributions to causes, even though she now requires an assistant to reply to all the requests she receives, and to decide which to support.
None of the novels is programmatically political or feminist. Even The Edible Woman is actually proto-feminist, written before the subjects it described, eating disorders among them, were widely politicised. "I didn't invent feminism and it certainly didn't invent me," she remarked in 1984. "But I'm naturally sympathetic to it."
Smith feels that " The Edible Woman was absolutely of its time, and yet every time someone reads it for the first time it's of their time, it's for them. And all her books, wherever you come across them, have the great power of their own time and also for now."
Carmen Callil, who brought Atwood to British attention under her Virago imprint, says that "like George Eliot, she connects women's lives to injustice and to politics generally; because being a very, very intelligent woman, or being any good sort of woman in our time, did give you a good sense of the underdog; that is unavoidable for our generation."
Atwood's fiction is also interesting for its detailed evocations of the cruelty girls (as in Cat's Eye ) or women (in The Robber Bride ) are capable of meting out to each other; their manipulations and betrayals.
And her portrayals of men, though they can be uncomfortably acute, have been welcomed too: Atwood has had fan letters from men saying they feel that if they'd read her earlier, they wouldn't have ended up divorced.
The open-endedness of much of her fiction is also a quietly political gesture: she emphasises moments when people have a choice, and, having sketched out the factors involved in such choices, and what might be at stake, she suspends the moment of decision.
The ending of The Handmaid's Tale, when the entire narrative is called into question, historicised into distance at an academic conference, is wounding because the cherishing particularity of the book is glibly demeaned by joking professors: it seems a final insult to the victims. And the book ends with the phrase "Any questions?": it is ostensibly the lecturer's cheerful line, but its point is not lost on the reader.
Oryx and Crake has a similarly challenging thrust. As Smith puts it: "You go down into the dark with Margaret Atwood and she's a phenomenal entertainer - it's a kind of entertainment like Angela Carter's, a magical entertainment, and you are held, while you are in the dark, in some kind of light space. And she will say to you, look there's the dark, what are you going to do about it? I will reveal it to you, I will show it to you, and you can decide what to do. There is always the 'ever hope' of the entertainer, the real entertainer, the magician-entertainer, that she reveals things to you so you can understand them."
While at the time The Handmaid's Tale was written Atwood had Iran in mind, and her memories of Kabul, which she had visited in 1978, the book seems ever more relevant in a world of jostling theocracies and diminished civil liberties in both east and west.
One can only hope that her latest speculation, Oryx and Crake, does not prove as accurate: it deals with genetic engineering in a society of increasing social division, and a misguided eugenicist's engineering of atrocity.
It is also the first novel Atwood has written from a male point of view: "It's the first novel in which it's essentially one voice all the way through; even the story of Oryx [the main female character] is the story of Oryx as told to us through Jimmy. I do pick a couple of readers before I give these things to publishers and one of my early readers was a man - just to make sure I hadn't really strayed off the path. I think he gave me two tips about foul language..."
Her narrator, a shambling survivor of a plague who has renamed himself the Snowman, recounts how the human race ended so badly. As the book progresses, he tries desperately to remember a vocabulary and literacy rendered otiose; but, as all previous achievement slips away, irrevocably, there are signs that the human desire for belief systems, inquiry, iconography and cosmology is ineradicable, and will resume. Atwood's fiction can be notably bleak in its prognoses; but always the writing seems to testify that creativity itself can be a potent good, a light in no light time.
Life at a glance
Margaret Atwood
Born: November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario.
Education: University of Toronto, Harvard.
Married: 1967 James Polk, divorced; current partner Graeme Gibson (one daughter, Eleanor "Jess" Atwood Gibson).
Career: 1964-65 Lecturer in English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; '67-68 Instructor in English, Sir George Williams University, Montreal; '69-70 University of Alberta; '71-72 Assistant Professor of English, York University, Toronto; various writer-in-residencies subsequently; president of the Writers' Union of Canada 1981-82; '84-86 president of International PEN, Canadian Centre (English Speaking).
Poetry: 1966 The Circle Game; '91 Poems 1965-1975; '95 Morning in the Burned House.
Novels: 1969 The Edible Woman; '72 Surfacing; '76 Lady Oracle; '79 Life Before Man; '81 Bodily Harm; '85 The Handmaid's Tale; '88 Cat's Eye; '93 The Robber Bride; '96 Alias Grace; 2000 The Blind Assassin; '03 Oryx and Crake. Non-fiction: 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature; 2002 Negotiating with the Dead.
Some honours and awards: Honorary degrees from 16 educational institutions, including Cambridge University, Oxford University, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College; '81 Guggenheim Fellowship; '90 Order of Ontario; '94 Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Literary awards include the Molson Award, the Giller Prize for Alias Grace, the Booker Prize (2000) and the International Association of Crime Writers' Dashiell Hammett Award for The Blind Assassin.
· Margaret Atwood appears at the Guardian Hay Festival (May 23-June 1) in conversation with David Aaronovitch on May 24. For programme information see www.hayfestival.com or write to Hay Festival, The Drill Hall, 25 Lion Street, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5AD. Box office: 0870 990 1299. · Oryx and Crake is published by Bloomsbury on May 5, price £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.
· The opera of The Handmaid's Tale is being staged at the ENO until May 2.
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