Sitting in A grand 18th-century clubhouse near St James's Park in London,
Margaret Atwood exudes intelligence; her fine, birdlike features,
mischievous blue eyes and barely tamed curls suggest a mind still gleaming
on the eve of her 70th birthday. Even more remarkable than her presence,
though, is her prescience.
In 1984 she wrote a dystopian vision of a fundamentalist society in which
women are reduced to the status of child-bearers and servants, forcibly
desexualised and veiled - The Handmaid's Tale pre-empted the Taleban's
misogynist regime in Afghanistan, and the rows over Islamic women's dress
and rights in Europe. Another futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake, charted the
destruction of the Earth by global warming, pandemics and rampant genetic
engineering. It was published in 2003, before Sars, bird flu, An
Inconvenient Truth, and the genome revolution.
Now, in her new nonfiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth -
a fascinating, freewheeling examination of ideas of debt, balance and
revenge in history, society and literature - Atwood has again struck upon
our most current anxieties. As the credit crunch grounds airlines and
topples banks, nobody can escape the spectre of debt. So where does she keep
her crystal ball?
“It was a coincidence,” she claims. “I chose this topic several years ago and
then found myself writing the book while all this was happening - the
sub-prime mortgage crisis, and these ads plastering the Underground: ‘We
will help you with your debt', ‘Why pay more?', ‘Declare personal
bankruptcy!'.”
The subject of debt first occurred to her when she was asked to write a public
“letter to America”: “I found myself doing it as the troops were about to
invade Iraq, and I wrote, ‘Why are you digging yourself into a great big
hole of debt?' Typically empires expand past where they can afford to defend
their perimeters, at which point something is going to break.” She gives a
dry chuckle. “The barbarians will get in sooner or later.”
Payback is Atwood's contribution to the Massey Lectures - a prestigious annual
event that has been hosted by Martin Luther King and J. K. Galbraith - and
once the book is published she will tour her native Canada reading from it.
It has been hard explaining what it is about, though, or why she, a
novelist, should be tackling economics: “It was never just about money: it
was about owing. Money is the form in which we have embodied this but it
takes a huge number of other forms. What we're really talking about is
imbalances of obligation, which is what debt is.” Payback casts its net far
and wide, taking in Ancient Egyptian heart-weighing, the bizarre practice of
“sin eating”, Mesopotamian debt slavery, simian trading habits, Scrooge,
Faustus, Get Shorty and Jung.
The Iraq war may have been the kick-off point, but debt had preoccupied Atwood
for as long as she can remember. Her parents lived through the Great
Depression, during which their income went into four envelopes: “Rent”,
“Groceries”, “Other Necessities” and “Recreation”. “The
first three envelopes had priority,” Atwood writes, “and if there was
nothing left for the fourth envelope, there were no movies, and my parents
went for a walk instead.” This, she concludes, is the “lost art” of “living
within your means”.
Born in 1939 in Toronto, Atwood recalls that “We weren't supposed to talk at
the dinner table about religion or money or sex. Money interested me because
it was forbidden - but you knew it was there.” She collected pretty coins
and was fascinated by the cash-splashing exploits of the comic-book
character Scrooge McDuck; but it wasn't until she was 8 - when she had her
first paying job and bank account - that money became real. “My parents
didn't give my brother and me a lot of pocket money; they had worked from a
young age and didn't see why we shouldn't too. But a lot of the traditional
‘kid jobs' that I did are now either classified as child labour or they
don't exist.”
After babysitting and blueberry picking, as a teen Atwood was employed as an
“arrow demonstrator” - having learnt archery during a “curious upbringing”
that involved spells in the remote Quebec woods while her father studied
insect behaviour - at a sports show. Later, with a friend, she ran a
children's puppetry business that became so successful that they hired an
agent. Even writing quickly proved its earning potential: “I was very
pleased when my first poem got published. I got paid $5 - probably more than
the rate now,” she adds, laughing.
As an adult, Atwood retained her parents' frugality, while immersing herself
in another deeply financial environment: “I became a Victorian. That was my
field of study at univer-sity - and that's the age par excellence in which
plots are driven by money and people are embroiled in an outbreak of
capitalism. Wuthering Heights is driven by money: Heathcliff earns a fortune
and then comes back to extract the house from its previous owner. Madame
Bovary would have been quite all right had she kept within her budget. It's
not the adultery - it's the debt that sank her.”
It is the most famous 19th-century character of all, though, who is the
presiding spirit of Payback: Ebenezer Scrooge, the progenitor of Disney's
Scottish miser duck. “He's an extreme version of ‘living within your
means',” Atwood says. “He does nothing with them except make more means.” In
a capitalist society, Scrooge's major sin is that his currency is not
“current” - it does not flow. Until, that is, he undergoes his
transformation, when he becomes a dual, before-and-after figure. “He fulfils
both our wishes: our wish to keep it all to ourselves and our other wish to
be kind and generous and for people to like us”. The central chapter of
Payback shows how Scrooge is the mirror image of the 16th-century Dr
Faustus. Between Marlowe and Dickens, society's view of riches had reversed:
for Faustus free-spending is damnation, for Scrooge it's salvation.
For us it's the norm. In the past 50 years we have gone so far down the
free-spending route that debt is no longer feared but shruggingly accep-ted:
from student loan to mortgage, everyone's in the red. And while the
Victorians had the threat of debtors' prisons, we have the escape route of
personal bankruptcy. But as credit becomes scarcer, Atwood thinks that the
tide is turning: “Once you get TV shows where people are repenting not that
they've cheated on their wife but how in debt they are, then you're
returning to a mode in which debt is considered sinful, and thrift is
valued. Nobody in the Eighties would have been caught dead in recycled
clothing, but now vintage is chic.”
If citizens are relearning the arts of thrift, their governments are lagging
behind. The Times Square debt clock in New York was switched off in 2000
because the Clinton Government had built up a budget surplus. But when
George W. Bush's spending spree began, it was rebooted, and now stands at
almost $10 trillion (£5.6 trillion). “Who's going to pay for it?” Atwood
asks. “The US taxpayer. They already have - their social services have
suffered horribly. But people didn't understand that it was happening. [The
invasion of Iraq] was like one of those magician's tricks where somebody is
waving a red handkerchief and while everybody's looking at it somebody else
is stealing your wallet.” In the fortnight since we met, the pickpocketing
has become even more audacious: the multibillion-dollar bailouts of the
mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the proposed rescue of the
insurance group AIG will come straight out of the taxpayer's purse.
But financial debt is not our biggest burden. In writing Payback Atwood became
fascinated with a phrase spoken of the dead: “He has paid his debt to
nature.” “It means you've borrowed something - the physical part of yourself
made up of natural elements - and you're paying it back by dissolving into
nature. What else are we borrowing from nature and how do we repay it?” The
book's final chapter proposes an answer in strong terms.
It's surprising, I say, to see a novelist - whose usual tools are ambiguity
and indirection - produce something so close to polemic. Atwood is convinced
that the form demands it: “Lecture series like this are secular sermons. You
can't just throw a topic like this on to the table without deciding which
part of it you think is good and which is bad.”
The bad part is the way we have treated the planet, and at the moment, there
isn't much of a good part in sight. “Early cultures would make sacrifices to
ensure a good harvest or whatever. If we don't change our ways the
sacrifices will be made for us - and that is already going on, what with
droughts, famines and floods. Talk to any epidemiologist and what they're
really worried about is a mega-plague coming our way. We're overcrowded and
malnourished - the same conditions preceded the Black Death.” It's a
distressing vision - even more so when you remember Atwood's impressive
track record in prognostication.
If mankind could declare bank-ruptcy and wipe the slate clean, we would. But
we can't: instead, Atwood argues, we need to learn to manage our debt, and
to pull ourselves back into the black: “We should start thinking of
ourselves as elements in the balance, and how we are throwing out the
balance. It's not a moral obligation - it's a physical obligation.”
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, £9.99 Buy
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