"I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy."-- An Interview with Margaret Atwood

I had the privilege of interviewing the writer Margaret Atwood during her recent visit to India.

The published interview, for Vantage, is here.

For anyone interested, a [much] longer version of the conversation is below.

At 76, there are few genres Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has not worked in. Author of seventeen volumes of poetry, eight collections of short fiction, and fifteen novels, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once for The Blind Assassin in 2000. Atwood was also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2005 and 2007.

Her work ranges from incisive realist writing to speculative fiction. The writer and critic Trisha Gupta caught up with Atwood on 30 January, a few days after Atwood’s conversation with writer Patrick French at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi. Gupta and Atwood discussed genre, parental approval and the place of realistic fiction in the digital age.

Trisha Gupta: You have a longstanding interest in the environment. Where does it come from?
Margaret Atwood: I was what they call an early adopter. Because I did grow up in it. My dad was a biologist.

That last story in Moral Disorder, about the backwoods and this Indian gentleman arriving with his tennis racket is true. I think he thought he was going to the English countryside. I was very young at the time, but my mother and my aunts told me about this. And it was during the war, so he must have been from quite a well-to-do family, even to have such an education. He must have been at a Canadian university and spending summer at a research station up in the woods. And those research stations really were up in the woods. Far, far up: no electricity, no tennis court. [laughs]

TG: You've described some of that world in Surfacing, earlier.

MA: Yes. So my parents were conscious very early, of things like pesticides, DDT, things that affected biological populations. They were early Sierra Club, Federation of Ontario naturalists, conservationists, birdwatchers, back in the day when it was thought to be kind of nutty. My brother turned into a biologist…

So I know the plot… It made it easy for me to write a book like Oryx and Crake [the first in a post-apocalyptic trilogy that looks at rebuilding the world after a chemical fallout]. Because I can talk the talk. And I knew if I didn’t talk the talk correctly, I was going to get a critique from my brother. He said (switches to a voice lower than her own): “I think you did quite a good job on the sex. But I’m not so sure about the cats.” But science has borne me out since! Turns out that the purring of cats does have a neurologically soothing effect and is akin to the ultrasound that we use to heal bones.

TG: I believe your father wanted you to be a botanist.
MA: Yes, I was very good at botany. Better than at English, because in English they took half-marks off for spelling mistakes.

TG: Education—especially in India—divides the scientific and the literary or artistic into such starkly separate spheres.
MA: We divide things in order to teach them. But it’s a false division. People with creative minds are frequently creative across a range: Leonardo da Vinci was a wonderful painter but he was also trying to invent an airplane.

TG: But there seems more and more a sense that you must specialise.
MA: I think that was true in the twentieth century. We’re now seeing a movement back the other way.

Say, in medicine, once, if you were a toe doctor, toes was all you’d do. Now they’re trying to get back to looking at the whole person. And all of these things have a narrative component.“Tell me your medical history.” It’s a story: “First I felt this lump on my toe, then I got a terrible headache.” The eastern idea that parts of the body are connected with other parts is gaining a lot more credibility now.

TG: You were somewhat scathing about genres in your conversation with Patrick French.
MA: Genres are useful for bookstores. And for certain kinds of readers who want to read nothing but science fiction, or nothing but fantasy. They know exactly where to go in the bookstore—there’ll be something with a dragon on it, that’s for them. But just like in literary fiction, some books with dragons on them will be of higher quality than others. So you shouldn’t dismiss a book just because it has a dragon on it. Some will have a meditative, philosophical element in addition to the adventure—just like a classical Indian epic poem. But I’ve had people say to me, I never read books by men. Or I never read books by women. Or I never read sci-fi. Or anything that isn’t sci-fi. Why such insecurity? Why not expose yourself to something else? It may not be a good experience, but it’ll be different.

TG: You yourself began by writing poetry.

MA: Actually I began by writing comic books. At seven. Then I wrote a novel. About an ant. It had some narrative problems. But I was an early reader and writer. Nothing else to do in the woods. Also, my brother was a prolific writer at that age. He was older. So of course I imitated him. People say who was your earliest influence, I either say, 'My brother' or 'Beatrix Potter'. 

TG: Have your choices of form been determined by age?

MA: Okay, so when I started in high school, I wrote all the things I presently write, and more. I wrote a newsletter, I wrote fiction, non-fiction – essays, that's what we learnt to do in school – and poetry. In the early days in Canada, it was much easier to get the poetry published. First of all, there were little magazines devoted to it. Second, it was short. In fact, I hand-typeset my first book of poems on a flatbed press. I made the cover out of a lino-block. It was seven poems, we sold them for 50 cents. I wish I'd kept more of them. 

TG: You have some, though?

MA: One. 

TG: How old were you then?

MA: 21.

TG: Did you have a writing community?
MA: It was small. It was the fifties. You were supposed to be a doctor, a lawyer, in business.

TG: In many ways, we’re still in the fifties, here.
MA: No, we’re not. You have quite a lively art scene.

TG: But everyone is fighting their parents to get to that.
MA: That will always be universally true. When I announced at 16 that I was going to be a writer, you could see them blanch. Being them, they bit their tongues and tried to discourage me in indirect ways. My mother said, “If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better learn to spell.”

I said, others will do that for me. But what I really thought – and I really did think this – was you could make quite a lot of money by writing 'True Romance' stories, for 'True Romance' magazines -- with the tear coming out the girl's eye, and in the background, another girl embracing a young man. [Fakes a sniffle] You could tell what the plot was going to be.

My idea was, I’d write those to make a living, and in the evenings, I’d write my cross between Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, with some Faulkner thrown in. I tried, but I wasn’t any good at them—you have to believe.

So I thought I’d go to journalism school. Then a second cousin, who was a journalist, said, if you’re a woman you’ll end up writing the fashion pages and the obituaries. I thought, I’ll go to university after all: teach in fall, winter and spring, and write my deathless masterpiece…

TG: …in the summer.
MA: Yes. After university in Toronto, I was going to run away to France: live in a garret, drink absinthe, be a waitress. I had those ideas. Existentialists, we were in those days. But my college advisor said, quite rightly, you’ll probably get more writing done as a graduate student. So I went to Harvard and became a nineteenth century specialist. You get to read a lot of utopias. They thought everything was going to get better and better. We didn’t get dystopias until the twentieth century.

TG: That’s fascinating. Does that connect to what you said recently, that now isn’t the time for realistic fiction?
MA: What I said was, it’s hard to write really realistic fiction, unless you pretend that nobody watches TV, or is on the internet. To make it plausible, people would have phones. Things get arranged differently. It’s not as easy as it was when reality was more static.

Even some of the realistic fiction of the past was set in the past – Vanity Fair, or A Tale of Two Cities. So you took a reality that wasn't going to change...

TG: One of my favourites of your books is Alias Grace [a novel about a woman who was jailed for murder, in 19th century Canada]. 

MA: The problem with writing a fiction like that is we know quite a lot, but some things are hard to find out: daily life that everybody took for granted. People tend not to write them in their diaries. 

TG: Do you think that has changed now, with our documenting everything we do?

MA: Except how are we documenting it? Digital information is unstable. You remember floppy discs. I have some, I can't read them. The first novel I wrote on them was The Robber Bride. Four chapters a disk.

Think of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle—is it predictive, or is it of the moment in which he wrote it? It has to be the latter, because there isn’t any “the future.” There’s an infinite number of possible futures, and we don’t know which one we’re going to get. So I say, write plausible fiction. The reader has to believe it.

TG: Is this the key difference between science fiction and speculative fiction?
MA: Yes, it’s the difference between something that could happen, and something that really couldn’t. Sci-fi, especially sci-fi fantasy—we know it’s not real. It’s another world, not without its excitements and adrenalin bursts, but it’s not going to happen to us tomorrow, or next year, or probably ever. It is a galaxy far, far away—though everybody looks like us, or Carrie Fisher [one of the stars of the Star Wars series of films].

Spec-fic is this world, this planet; it could happen, we’re thinking of it now. [The writer George Orwell’s] 1984, it had already happened. [The writer Aldous Huxley’s] Brave New World, it was happening. My rule for The Handmaid’s Tale [a dystopian novel set in a United States that has become totalitarian Christian theocracy, where women have lost their rights], was that I would not put anything into it that we had not already done.“People say, you’ve got such a twisted, dark imagination.” Actually, it’s not my imagination.

TG: I noticed that you like to use voice as performance. Have you ever been attracted to oral storytelling, being an actor?

MA: Absolutely. One of my first businesses, because I was an entrepreneurial little child, was a puppet show for 5-year-olds' birthday parties. We were 14, 15, 16. We ended up with an agent, we were pretty good! We did the voices, we made the hand-puppets. We did the classics: Hansel and Gretel, The Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood. You'll notice that they all involve what little children at that age are fascinated by, which is cannibalism.

I've written a play. I've written an opera libretto. You can go online and see my hockey goalee video. In the seventies, I did a lot of film scripts.

TG: Does the spoken word give you more control than the written word?

MA: Not more. A different kind of control. You can read more about what is it that makes writing different from the other arts in my book called Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

TG: Is the way we live now making writing and reading very different from what it used to be?

MA: There are different platforms. For instance, Wattpad. Young kids, but also other people, are using it to story-share, and disguise their real identities. 

TG: You seem to enjoy Twitter. 

MA: I enjoy it. The rules for Twitter are the same as being the host of a radio station -- or conversation at a party. Some authors are told by their publishers to use Twitter to promote themselves. No, wrong idea: you can use twitter to promote other people. You can invite guests. You can retweet. You can share information. There's humour. 

TG: Is there anything about Twitter that annoys you?

MA: I think other people's experience of Twitter is not the same as mine. It's self-selecting. You attract people interested in your radio station. And they know by now that if they're rude, I'll block them. 

TG: But though you like it, I believe you limit your tweeting time to ten minutes a day. 

MA: That's my story [grins].

TG: So it's not true?

MA: Tweeting time, yes, but the internet is very handy for things that are well-known within a culture. Like I'm reading this [fishes out a copy of Mahasweta Devi's After Kurukshetra, set after the battle of the Mahabharata] – and I had to look up the back story, so I could understand what she was retelling. 

TG: But you don't think the internet has changed us?

MA: The platform does alter how we perceive, but only alters how we perceive within that window. It alters how we narrate. So before the jumpcut in film, you would have to have a paragraph of explanation every time you change the scene. In the 19th century novel, it'd be: 'While Oliver was learning to pick pockets, in another part of the city...'

TG: We assume simultaneity now. 

MA: Yes. It's the meanwhile part. It's what I did with the MaddAddam Trilogy. I have Oryx and Crake and then simultaneously, The Year of the Flood. Then I connect them in the third book. 

TG: Starting out, did you find it difficult to get published because you were a woman?
MA: No, because I was Canadian. (laughs) There were only a couple of Canadian publishing companies in the 60s. There was also Oxford Canada, and Macmillan Canada, but your chances with them were slim. You could move to the United States and become pseudo-American, or to London. It was a post-colonial time. So we had men and women writers working together on the problem of being Canadian. Young writers started their own publishing companies, some of which are still going, and quite respectable. I was working in publishing, too, the way we did, basically unpaid: looking at each others’ manuscripts, sitting on the board, looking at the slush pile.

TG: Does the Indian publishing industry look different from your last visit, 27 years ago?
MA: There’s a lot more of it now. The landscape you see now didn’t exist. There weren’t any literary festivals. A lot of new publications have sprung up.

TG: Do you enjoy literature festivals?
MA: I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy.

TG: How was the Jaipur Literature Festival?
MA: Extremely filled with people! I think it was a third of a million attendance this time. They have to be congratulated on handling that, they've got a system which more or less works. 
Everybody was extremely pleasant. I think it’s because you’re supposed to be nice to old people. If I were younger, I’d get more aggressive questions. 

TG: And you didn't at JLF?
MA: I got one by a guy that said, well, the women's movement has been a failure. So I said, think of all these things that were once hotly debated, such as are women human beings, should they be allowed to attend university, have jobs. I think we're in the third wave, where the hot button issues are violence, rape and murder. 
 
In the early days, people would say things like: “What makes you think you can write?” Or the radio guy would start off with “I haven’t read your book and I’m not going to. But tell me, in 25 words or less, what’s it about?”
One of my favourites was: “So, The Handmaid’s Tale is autobiography.” I said, “No, it’s not. It’s set in the future.” He said, “That’s no excuse.”

TG: Do you think there is resistance from men to reading books written by women?
MA: Books by young women? Yes. You don’t want a girl that’s smarter than you, if you’re thinking of her as somebody you might date. Middle-aged women? It’s your mom: run away. But Granny? Granny always gave you that cookie nobody else would give you. There’s a lot of pushback in sci-fi and online gaming: those guys are afraid women will come in and tell them they can’t have rape scenes in their video games. I seem to have a pretty large younger male readership for the MaddAddam trilogy. Less for the realistic fiction, but not none. Because I cover quite a large range, my readership has always been wide. Any age, any gender, any country.

TG: The idea that continues to plague us is that the things that women write about most often are seen as “domestic”—which is apparently not universal.
MA: If a man writes a domestic novel about changing a baby: “Hero!!” If a woman writes it: “Why do we have read this shit, baby-diapers-crap?” But a lot more younger men are a lot more participatory in their families. And they seem to enjoy it. You never would have seen that in the 50s.

The Case of the Punjabi Detective

My Asian Age piece on the mystery writer Tarquin Hall and his wonderful creation: the portly Delhi detective, Vish Puri. 

When the father of a Pakistani cricketer dies of poisoning during a post-match VVIP dinner in New Delhi, the trail seems to lead to an illegal cricket betting syndicate that has bookies in every town on the subcontinent and is headed by an underworld kingpin believed to reside in Pakistan. But because The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (2012) is the third mystery featuring Vish Puri, the portly and wonderfully entertaining Punjabi detective, we know that sooner or later his Mummy is going to get involved. And the plot will thicken.

Vish Puri, “India’s Most Private Investigator”, first appeared on the literary stage in Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant (2009), complete with waxed moustache, safari suit, signature Sandown cap and an irresistible weakness for chilli pakoras. Having traversed Jaipur morgues and police stations and the uranium mines of Jadugoda in search of a missing maid in the first book, Puri has since solved The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing (2010), a marvellously entertaining take on rationalists, magicians and fake godmen that remains my favourite of the series.

Hall’s long globetrotting career as a journalist has included stints in the United States, Pakistan, India, Kenya and Turkey. He has earlier published several non-fiction books, including To the Elephant Graveyard (2000), an account of a search for a killer elephant in Assam and Salaam Brick Lane (2005), a memoir about a year spent living above a Bangladeshi sweatshop in London’s East End. But Vish Puri is his first fictional creation.

Hall describes Martin Amis and Rushdie as “unreadably pretentious” and prefers “a good story that you can follow, simply written” — though “simple”, he’s quick to add, “doesn’t mean easy”. When he decided to try his hand at fiction, he was only sure of one thing — he wasn’t going to write “terribly worthy” novels. He began writing a book set in a motel in India, but abandoned it when his agent “said it was rubbish”.

The idea for a detective series came, fittingly, out of a journalistic piece. And the idea for that piece came from a conversation with his wife Anu Anand’s cousin. “I was teasing Shikha — she’s from Jammu — about how she wasn’t married, and she started telling me about how she had discovered that she was being investigated by a detective,” Hall remembers. The prospective groom’s family wanted to find out if she drank, smoked, had a boyfriend. Private investigators, it seemed, were doing booming business in India, with more and more people hiring them to inquire into prospective arranged matches. The whole thing seemed superbly story-worthy to Hall, and his interviews with several private investigators led to a long reported piece.

Later, when he was scouting about for fiction ideas, the detectives he’d met came back to him. But what really helped him visualise his rotund, opinionated, middle-aged Punjabi investigator was his wife’s uncles. “They have a certain size to them, they’ve become the seniors in their families,” Hall says. “They sit around drinking Scotch and making fairly bad jokes, but they’re very wily. At the same time they have a sense that there ought to be certain standards in society.” Vish Puri is very much this sort of combination of streetsmartness and pomposity: a pugnacious Punjabi man of a certain age who is used to “telling everybody what to do”.

“In the West, everyone would just tell them to shut up. The age hierarchy was thrown out of the window there long ago,” says Hall. “That has its benefits, but it’s also a bit of a shame — people with a certain amount of experience in teaching, say, or politics, aren’t necessarily given their due.” In the Indian universe that Vish Puri occupies, in contrast, young people tend to respect their parents’ wishes; daughters studying in a different city check with fathers about whether it’s okay to take a low-cost flight back home on Diwali; grandfathers have no qualms getting their granddaughters’ prospective husbands secretly investigated. (This was an important subplot in Missing Servant).

Hall’s narratives are punctuated by stable, wholesome family gatherings where any deep, dark rifts or family secrets are kept out of sight — unless, as in Butter Chicken, they turn out to be crucial in solving the mystery. There’s entertainment provided by mild friction between Puri and his slightly foolish brother-in-law Baggaji, or more integral to plot, between Puri and his redoubtable Mummy — but on the whole, Hall’s version of the North Indian family is a genial one. Whether it’s a grandchild’s mundan ceremony or a family Diwali, everyone seems to basically get along. “Yes, well, I like that side of India,” says Hall. “There aren’t a lot of pleasantries between people who don’t know each other otherwise, which is jarring as a foreigner. So I like it when you go to someone’s house in India and they’re all very cordial.”

Some of this affection for the ways of his adoptive country emerges from an implicit comparison with the one he grew up in. “The family structure in Britain is a mess,” Hall says. “Here, all familial relationships may not be smooth sailing, but everyone recognises that keeping the bond alive is important.”

Hall’s relationship with the Indian city seems more conflicted. The vivid, non-stop action is clearly something he finds attractive. The everyday buzz we take for granted in a city like Delhi, he points out, can’t be matched by a Western city even at its most eventful: London during the Olympics, when there is supposedly so much going on—“everywhere you go there are announcements,” — is actually “really quiet and predictable”. But the brashness and loudness of public behaviour in Delhi still seems to affect him — he mentions with a tinge of quiet despair that he has “a driver who never says sorry or thank you”, and confesses that living in the leafy, quiet, uber-genteel neighbourhood of Nizamuddin East is a way to keep the everyday onslaught of Delhi life slightly at bay.

Vish Puri, not unlike Hall, is happy to avail of the cushion that upper middle-class life in Delhi can provide: he is hands-on when he needs to be, but is driven everywhere by his driver, and cannot live without airconditioning. But he is also positioned as somewhat old-school: he may live in Gurgaon, but his car is still the trusty Ambassador, and the stolid 1980s décor of his Khan Market office is sans glass partitions. The old-school-ness extends to Puri’s family life. Domestic help is aplenty, but his wife Rumpi insists on waking at five in the morning to supervise the running of the house (“No doubt she was downstairs now churning fresh butter for his double-roti”) and keep up traditional homestyle beauty treatments (“Or she was in the second bedroom rubbing mustard oil into her long auburn hair”).

As is apparent, Hall caters happily to a romantic vision of India, strewing the books with references that a British readership would recognise, from the Gymkhana Club and cricket to the Partition, and adding swatches of local colour that might appear in a Did-You-Know type travel show: the diamond-transporting Angadiyas of Surat, or the genealogy-keeping Pandas of Hardwar. And you will either be amused or irritated by the ceaseless “Indianisms” squeezed in to every conversation. The reversed word order of “So engrossed I become” or “He kept all these things where exactly?” is common enough in Indian English to feel accurate. But when Mummy tells a gathering of drivers — with whom she would definitely speak in Hindi in real life — that “Some goondas have done armed robbery of our kitty party”, it seems like we’re in a Delhi-set version of Mind Your Language.

But what is nice about Hall’s books is that his gaze is never sneering. His affection for India — unlike say, William Dalrymple in City of Djinns — transcends the nostalgia-inducing stuff. His clear-eyed look at the contemporary is delivered in a non-judgmental, even-handed tone. Puri’s scandalised thoughts on immoral youngsters may seem a caricature, but there’s always detail when it matters most. We’re told what a young urban professional shells out to a personal trainer versus what he pays his car-washer. In Missing Servant, which has plenty to say about the maltreatment of domestic servants, we also hear a maid bargaining with a potential employer. There’s no shying away from the compulsions of poverty or powerlessness — but there is no weepy sensationalising of them either.

These books are fiction — and enjoyably plotted fiction, too — but Hall takes a sharp-eyed pleasure in the facts that can only be described as journalistic. In the best possible way.

(A version of this piece appeared in today's Asian Age.)