And now for one of the most hotly anticipated events of the festival. Margaret Atwood, nowadays more famous for her absences than her presence (witness her infamous "remote signing" LongPen, which caused something of a stir at this year's London Book Fair), is taking part in three separate events at this year's the Hay festival. The first, this evening's, is a reading from her most recent project The Penelopiad, her reworking of the myth of Odysseus from the perspective of his wife.
Atwood wins her audience over from the start. "It's a pleasure to be back in Hay," she says. "I had some of that famous sheep ice cream you have here earlier. And look what happened to my hair."
Her hair, as ever, is wild, but her face is remarkable, chiselled and handsome, and her wit even more so. She keeps the audience in stitches with anecdotes, and even at one point makes a fair stab at an impression of her British agent's cut-glass accent. She has an incredible presence; mesmeric, bewitching. It's difficult to believe that it's really her up there, talking; she definitely falls into the category of people so famous you can't believe they're still alive.
She begins with a brief, witty dissection of the Odyssey myth. "He spent many years trying to get back to Ithaca - or that's his story" she tells us, "meeting with lots of beautiful goddesses along the way, most of whom he was forced to sleep with. Poor man." Later on she mentions "an issue in the Odyssey that people often worry over, which is, why is it that Telemachus behaves so rudely to his mother?" She pauses, and fixes the audience with a wry eye before beginning the sentence again: "Why is it that the teenage boy Telemachus ..." Becoming more serious for a moment, she relates an incident from Homer's narrative "so horrific that many people just leave it out", where Odysseus on his return to Ithaca decides, on the flimsiest of evidence, to butcher 12 of his wife's maids. It is the shades of these women who provide the backdrop to Atwood's interpretation - the 'Greek chorus' to Penelope's narrative.
From there, she goes on to read from her book. It's wonderful stuff; the cynical, distinctively 21st-century tone enhanced by Atwood's dry, deep, North Atlantic accent. "I spent most of my early life crying my eyes out", Penelope says, at one point. "Fortunately in those days there were veils." Later, "You weren't exactly a Helen," says one of the suitors, Antinous, to Penelope, "but we could have dealt with that. The darkness conceals much."
Penelope, one feels, is a projection of Atwood herself, and frankly, there's nothing wrong with that. By the end of the hour I, along with every other member of the audience, have fallen for her, big time. I've yet to read The Penelopiad, but it's right at the top of my Hay to-buy list.
