Don't ask for the truth
The heavy scent from a florist's shop drifts in through the cafe's wide-open window. Outside, the traffic of a summer afternoon swirls along the busy street. When she walks in, the first thing you see is Margaret Atwood's wide-brimmed black hat, which serves its wearer less for the purposes of fashion than for camouflage.
Following the death of Robertson Davies last winter, Atwood is -unquestionably - Canada's best-known author. Since her first volume of poetry, The Circle Game, appeared in 1966, she has averaged more than a book a year: novels, short stories, essays, poems and children's books, not to mention her editing of several anthologies. Her unruly hair is familiar here from a dozen magazine covers; her lethal wit and monotone voice, from a host of radio and TV appearances.
Fame is not the spur any longer; fame can be her enemy. Atwood is much in demand from a bevy of causes and movements. Toronto - now a multicultural city of four million people - looks on her with fond possessiveness. Atwood often begins her novels abroad, where there's less danger of well-meant interruptions.
At 56, Atwood is at the height of her formidable powers. This month will see the appearance of her ninth novel, Alias Grace, a tale of 19th- century murder that happens to be rich in contemporary resonance. The book is being published simultaneously in Canada, Britain, the US and also in Germany, thanks to a remarkably rapid translation from Berlin Verlag.
As usual with Atwood, the title has a range of meanings. But unusually for her, the novel is based on a true story: that of Grace Marks, who emigrated from the north of Ireland to Upper Canada as a 13-year-old girl in 1840. There was all too little grace in her life. Three years later, by now a servant in a wealthy home north of Toronto, she and a stable hand, James McDermott, were arrested for the murder of their employer and his housekeeper (a euphemism for mistress). McDermott was publicly hanged, a fate Grace only just escaped. She may or may not have been his lover.
Atwood has known about the case for decades. She first came across it in Life in the Clearings, a supposedly factual account of 19th-century Canada by the matronly Susanna Moodie. Atwood's third poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, includes a poem based on Moodie's visit to the yellow-walled lunatic asylum in Toronto. One of its inhabitants at the time was the notorious - and possibly deranged - Grace Marks.
Fast forward a couple of decades, to Atwood's most recent international book tour. By the early nineties, she'd become an undisputed star, her work published in more than 20 languages: a world traveller, a feminist icon. Promoting The Robber Bride, Atwood found herself in a hotel room in Zurich - and the first chapter of Alias Grace came, unbidden, into her head and on to the hotel's notepaper.
After that auspicious beginning, the book caused its share of trouble: 'I started a draft and then had a horrible headache on the train to Paris, when I realised I had to throw the whole thing out. This isn't the first time I've had that experience, and it's usually structural - the book had the wrong structure.' No longer convinced of Grace's guilt, Atwood set herself a tough challenge. She hired researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to ferret out information about the case, and promised not to contradict any of the facts they discovered; she would merely fill in the blanks. Luckily, the blanks remained huge.
Much of the novel takes place in 1859, when Grace was incarcerated in a women's penitentiary. By now well-behaved and still good-looking, she'd won over enough local citizens that a campaign to pardon her was under way. At the heart of the book are the stories Grace tells to a young doctor, Simon Jordan. But how honestly does she remember and speak?
In her celebrated fantasy novel about fertility control, The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood used the remote future to shed a pitiless light on right-wing sentiments in Ronald Reagan's America. Now, by going back in time, she's free to explore such current anxieties as the potential falsehood of memory and the psychological imprisonment of women.
'When there are crimes of violence,' Atwood suggests, 'involving both a man and a woman, it usually goes as follows: nobody ever says the man is a nice guy, but opinion often splits about the woman. Either she's the villainous instigator of it all, or else she's a terrified victim and she only did it because she was frightened for her life. That's the pattern with Grace. And there's evidence supporting both sides.' The extreme difficulty of finding out what really happened on any given occasion: this is one of Atwood's long-standing themes. The title poem of her collection True Stories ends like this: 'The true story is vicious / and multiple and untrue... / Why do you / need it? Don't ever / ask for the true story.' Despite which, we go on asking.
As Peter Ackroyd, A S Byatt and Brian Moore, among others, have shown, the Victorian era can serve as a splendid foil for a contemporary novelist's obsessions. 'All of this multiple personality and dissociation,' Atwood says, 'was a feature of 19th-century psychology until Freud. It's involved with hypnotism.
It's involved with the spiritualists, because they too put people into trances and talked to somebody who did not appear to be the person speaking. The 19th century was obsessed with memory, forgetting, sleepwalking - I read six authors on the subject of somnambulism. Where did Jung get much of his inspiration? 19th-century ballet and opera!' Atwood herself had been immersed in Victorian literature as a student in the early sixties.
One of her teachers at the University of Toronto was the great critic Northrop Frye ('It was rather like being watched by a sunflower'). At Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, she began a doctoral thesis on Rider Haggard and the English metaphysical romance. Yet until Alias Grace, she had never set a novel in the 19th century - though her partner, Ontario novelist Graeme Gibson, did exactly that with a book called Perpetual Motion.
Her attraction to the period goes far beyond academic nostalgia. 'I could say I grew up in it,' Atwood confides, 'and indeed that's partly true. My grandmother's house was in rural Nova Scotia, and until the late fifties, it was run the way a small 19th-century farmhouse would have been run. There were oil lamps and a wood stove and handmade butter - plus the quilts, of which she had quite a supply.' Atwood's father was an entomologist who took his wife and three children to live in a cabin in Canada's northern forests from early spring until late autumn each year. Not until the age of 12 did she spend a full year in school.
'Up north, of course, there were no modern technological devices apart from the can opener and the motorboat. I don't have to make a leap of imagination to see how Grace might have done the washing - I used to do the washing that way myself.' Even as a small child, Atwood had aspired to be a writer. Then she transferred her ambitions to painting, dress designing and (improbably enough) 'home economics'. No one at her high school in Toronto imagined that a literary career would be feasible; the authors she read were neither Canadian nor alive. Still, the teenage Atwood was already writing musical comedies, commercial jingles, even a brief opera libretto about synthetic fabrics.
Her graduate years in the Boston area helped turn Atwood into a Canadian nationalist. Her fellow students, she has written, had only the vaguest notion that Canada existed. 'It was that blank area north of the map where the bad weather came from - but if they thought about it at all, they found it boring. They seemed to want to believe that my father was a mounted policeman and that we lived in igloos.' Atwood has a liking for pointed generalisations. 'If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania,' she once wrote, 'that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.' Decades later, after fighting numerous battles on behalf of Canadian writers and publishers - not to mention her political struggles against the so-called 'free trade' deal with the US - the political Atwood seems more than a little bruised. Quebec's indecisive referendum last October left the fate of her country hanging in the balance.
'I felt very nervous on the night of the referendum,' she admits. 'I kept running upstairs to read The Lord of the Rings, because I found it so soothing. You know: the forces of evil, little hobbits, doom on every side, and nevertheless they make it through. Except in Quebec, you weren't always too sure what the forces of evil were.'