new myths for a new age

New myths for a new age

Margaret Atwood speaks out for a project she describes as 'the biggest simultaneous publication of anything, ever'

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, October 22, 2005

By Kim Goodliffe

In the lounge of Vancouver's Four Seasons Hotel, Margaret Atwood passes her hands over a toy crystal ball. An electronic windstorm erupts amid computer beeps. The eyes of the four-inch Merlin inside the ball flash red.

Atwood asks him some test questions and receives celestial responses. Will I go to Calgary tomorrow? ("It's in the stars!" Merlin says in a warbling voice.) Will it rain tomorrow? ("Absolutely! Be confident!")

But when I ask Merlin if Atwood's latest project -- Knopf's series, The Myths -- will transform humanity, his powers fail him.

"Yes, the images are cloudy," says Atwood, staring into the ball with her startlingly clear blue eyes, "but what about my book?"

"Absolutely!" Merlin proclaims. "But beware of false promises!"

Atwood laughs and says, "Like all oracles, he hedges his bets."

She should know. She went to the Underworld for her contribution to the series. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus is a clever retelling of Homer's Odyssey from the wife's and the hanged slaves' points of view.

It's being launched today at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Atwood describes the whole series as "the biggest simultaneous publication of anything, ever."

It was the brainchild of Jamie Byng, publisher of Canongate Books in the U.K. Three other publishers, including Canada's Louise Dennys, played midwife to the idea.

Worldwide, 33 publishers are taking part. All of them chose to launch with Atwood's The Penelopiad and Karen Armstrong's non-fiction book, A Short History of Myth. Those two books anchor the series.

Participating publishers could then choose from three other titles: British writer Jeanette Winterson's Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles; Israeli writer David Grossman's Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson; and Russian writer Victor Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

The other myths will be published in 2006 and beyond. Confirmed authors for the series include Chinua Achebe, A.S. Byatt, Alexander McCall Smith, Ali Smith and Donna Tartt.

"The idea," Atwood tells me, "is to have myths from all around the world told by writers from all around the world.

"Remember the Add-A-Pearl Necklace? You were supposed to get a pearl for your baby girl when she was born and then add a pearl every year. This is like Add-A-Pearl. They keep adding a couple of them every season."

Asked how she came to the project, she reveals her herculean weak spot.

"Jamie Byng talked me into it at breakfast time, the time of day when I have very little resistance. So I thought I would do it and help a small publisher."

Then he went and published Yann Martel's Life of Pi, "so maybe he wouldn't have needed help." If he had asked later, "maybe I would have said no.

"But I said I would do it and my agent was quite keen on it.

"And then I couldn't do it. I worked away for a year, trying to do it, and it didn't work because I was using the wrong myths, myths that didn't work for me.

"I went so far as to actually say [to my agent], 'Do you think Jamie would really mind if I cancelled the contract?'

"She said she thought he would mind quite a lot but if I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it.

"So I said, 'Give me a few more weeks.' "

Then her German publisher started pressuring her to launch the series. Putting on a German accent, Atwood says: "'Vee are vaiting for you, Margaret.'

"Why don't you launch with someone else?"

"'No! Vee are vaiting for you.'"

Then came more pressure. She agreed to be the series' Canadian spokesperson. She'll promote her retelling of the ancient myth in Canada's major cities from now through December.

As we talk, she attempts to describe the relationship between The Penelopiad and Armstrong's book-length essay on the power and meaning of myth.

"Let me put it this way: Some pages of the Old Testament are one line of text and the rest of the page is a commentary -- what people thought it meant."

Karen Armstrong is a Londoner and a former Roman Catholic nun known for her diverse writing on religion. In her book, she explains why myth is important to our understanding of ourselves, our ancestry and our world

Myths range from the hunting myths of the Paleolithic period to the rise of scientific thought and the concomitant discrediting of myth in the last 500 years, a period Armstrong refers to as "the Great Western Transformation."

Atwood explains that "when we say 'myth,' we don't mean something that's untrue. Nor do we mean any old story. Jokes are stories; they're not myths. Fables -- fox and grapes -- they're stories; they're not myths. Certain folktales are stories but not myths.

"What do we mean by 'myth'? We mean a story that is the foundation stone of a cultural system. So, Noah and the ark, Adam and Eve, the Trojan War" all count as myths.

She says that when she began experimenting with the myth of Penelope, it was a "swift write.

"I couldn't change the plot. I couldn't change the interpretation of the plot. Whatever I did, Odysseus was gonna come back and the maids were gonna get hanged. I didn't make any of that stuff up. You couldn't make it up."

Like her novels Oryx and Crake, Alias Grace and The Handmaid's Tale, The Penelopiad is based on heavy research. But it's Atwood's inventiveness and sense of humour that bring the characters and situation to life.

When she's asked how her research on the pantheon of Greek gods may relate to current religious issues, she quips: "I don't see anyone going to a church with a sign that says 'Zeus' on it."

Penelope begins the novel generally discouraged among the dead and tired of eating only one kind of food: the white flowers called asphodels.

"Well, the Greek afterworld wasn't a fun fair," she says. "The spirits did walk around in that fashion. They did squeak a lot ... And if you were bad, there were the lower levels, where you got tortured. It's not really a lot of fun.

"Of course, hell got worse. Indeed, when the Christians brought in hell, it was worse than that. But [for the Greeks] there wasn't a heaven part, where you got to have a really good time. You could get to the fields of Elysium if you'd been really quite a good hero, but even there it wasn't a ton of fun a minute.

"You were wan. You weren't yourself. Being alive was better."

Although it's uncertain whether The Penelopiad will be made into an opera, as The Handmaid's Tale was, a staged reading will take place this coming Wednesday in London, England. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, it will have 12 actresses playing the maids, some of them providing musical accompaniment.

Atwood will play the Underworld's new rising star -- none other than her latest protagonist, Penelope.

Vancouver writer Kim Goodliffe last profiled Margaret Atwood in 2003, when Oryx and Crake was published.

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