Payback (CBC Massey Lectures)

Precision and zest are two pretty good defining terms for any writing Margaret Atwood lays her hand to. And irony, and intelligence: those virtues, as Hitchens remarks, we are so much warned against. Irony layers her language: one of her poem collections is called YOU ARE HAPPY; one of her most moving poems is called “Last Day”. The quick vitality, her points that form themselves a shade faster than we expect, her boomerang use of current phrases—all these give Atwood’s artistry a contrarian side. In PAYBACK: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Anansi, 2008), the topic leaps off the ledger page and Atwood demonstrates its fiscal, emotional, sacrificial and literary facets as one of the conditions of our lives, as our great imaginary construct and as a recurring topic of our imaginative writing. It’s an ideal subject for Atwood to raise her eyebrow over, and in two hundred rapid pages we get Euripides, Eric Berne, Madame Defarge, Solon, the daughter of Jephthah, gelada monkeys, the Bedoneby sisters, Shylock (of course), Faustus (of course) and Scrooge (Original, Lite and Nouveau)—and an exceedingly interesting bibliography of current ecology websites. How much more shadowy can you get, Atwood has her reader ask, four chapters in: “Quite a lot more, because it’s shadowiest just before it gets even shadowier. But never mind, I’m saving the hopeful stuff for the end of the book. Just like Pandora.” Atwood as contrarian? In the fifth and final chapter: “I’ll try to make this as painless as possible. No, on second thought, I won’t do that: because if it were painless, it wouldn’t be about payback, would it?” Brava.