Margaret Atwood was recently described in a Guardian interview as “arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world”, and she is undoubtedly the most venerable. In the Introduction to Burning Questions, her third collection of essays and nonfiction pieces, spanning the years 2004 to 2021, she laments, with her characteristically tongue-in-cheek style, her much-lauded productivity: “Looking back at my sporadic, badly-kept and not very informative journals, I notice that one of the leitmotifs is a constant moaning about taking on too much. ‘This has to stop,’ I find myself saying.”
And yet – thankfully – she hasn’t. One of the most notable aspects of this collection is how engaged Atwood, now 82, has remained with the pressing issues of the day, and how vigorously she continues to pursue the public life of a writer; many of these pieces first took the form of speeches. When her long-term partner, Graeme Gibson, died during her 2019 tour for The Testaments, she carried on with her international speaking commitments – a decision of which she writes, “given a choice between hotel rooms and events and people on the one hand, and an empty house and a vacant chair on the other, which would you have chosen, Dear Reader?” In tribute to Gibson, the final section of Burning Questions includes the introductions she wrote to reissues of two of his novels, as well as the foreword to his The Bedside Book of Birds.
The majority of the pieces here are concerned with themes that have preoccupied her all her writing life: “subjects that still occupy my shrinking brain: ‘women’s issues’, writing and writers, human rights.” More recent essays add to that list the environment, free speech and the state of western democracy. Atwood has always been a political novelist in the broadest sense (though she would probably reject that description, given her dislike of literary labels), and the enduring popularity and pertinence of her fiction have bestowed on her an iconic status, which means swathes of readers now expect her to make definitive pronouncements on hot-button topics, particularly concerning feminist controversies, and are ready to attack if her stance is not to their liking.
One such controversy is addressed in the 2018 piece “Am I a Bad Feminist?”, which is not so much a rebuttal as a careful consideration of the titular accusation. It was occasioned by Atwood’s decision to sign an open letter to the University of British Columbia protesting at its treatment of an academic, Steven Galloway, who had been accused of sexual misconduct. “The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly,” she writes. Galloway was later cleared of sexual assault by a judge but lost his job anyway; the signatories of the letter had been concerned with the lack of due process and transparency, but Atwood’s “Good Feminist accusers” called her out for apparently siding with an alleged abuser. “And now, it seems, I am conducting a War on Women, like the misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist that I am,” she notes drily. But, as any reader of The Handmaid’s Tale knows, Atwood is suspicious of mob justice, especially when it is fuelled by self-righteousness, and she uses the Galloway incident as a starting point to reflect on the nature of witch trials, “in which a person was guilty because accused”.
It was a knife-edge position to take in the heat of the #MeToo movement, when believing the accuser was an article of faith for many feminists, but Atwood is clearly undaunted by opprobrium, calling instead for fairness and accountability. “In times of extremes, extremists win,” she writes, “…and moderates in the middle are annihilated.” Given her willingness to throw herself into the fray on social media, it would have been interesting to hear her considered thoughts on other current debates surrounding free speech and feminism. But then, as she observes in “The Writing of The Testaments” from 2020: “I have always been suspicious of the phrase the wrong side of history… History is simply human beings doing stuff.”
It’s fascinating to read Atwood’s reflections on her own novels and their continued relevance, sometimes three or four decades after the fact, but equally striking to see how many pieces she has included here generously celebrating other writers. There are tributes to Doris Lessing, Ursula K Le Guin and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the environmentalists Barry Lopez and Rachel Carson, and an essay on her abiding love for Shakespeare. Through all these pieces she communicates the message central to her wonderful 2014 book On Writers and Writing, that a writer must also be a reader.
One of the final pieces collected here is a tribute not to a book but an album, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, but the exhortation with which Atwood ends it could serve as a tag line for the whole of Burning Questions: “Have a listen. Confront the urgent questions. Feel the chill.”
• Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
