Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood: Wise warnings

Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004-2021

Author: Margaret Atwood

ISBN-13: 978-1784744519

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Guideline Price: £20

As the world knows, Margaret Atwood’s cerebral imagination produces brilliantly realised writing in a manner never less than authoritative. No less authoritative is this volume, which shows her turn over a range of subjects like a thoughtful archaeologist thumbing a piece of ground, seeking clarity about virtually everything, from freedom to culture wars, to bird-watching, autocracy and feminism.

Each of the book’s five parts marks a turning point in recent history. In part one, Atwood writes in the aftermath of the Twin Towers while the Iraq War is ongoing. Part two runs from 2010 to 2013, with Barack Obama serving as US president. The essays in part three comment on the precariousness of freedom after Donald Trump’s election. In the wake of Trumpism, she reflects on The Handmaid’s Tale, and how many Americans feared that it might not, after all, be fiction.

Atwood asks and answers what lesser voices so often can’t without being shot down by some reactive corner of the literary or political world. I identified with her perspective on ideologies in the essay on being a Bad Feminist, where she notes how ideology eliminates ambiguity. She also describes the #MeToo movement as symptomatic of a broken legal system, even if its effect was positive.

The essay In Translationland is an homage to translation. It moves from WG Sebald and the local languages of Norfolk in her native Canada, to the French cereal boxes she puzzled over as a child, and back to childhood in the Quebec north woods, where her initial encounter with another language (French) unfolded. The essay We Hang by a Thread is a sage reminder that “it wouldn’t take that much to roll back recent legal entitlements for women and send us right back to 1843 . . .”. In other words, the price of liberty is constant vigilance.

This volume will add to Atwood devotees’ existing book-stack, and readers will find satisfaction in her thoughts on the downfall of autocrats in the essay on the courageous Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. She also reflects on fellow Canadian Alice Munro, on Hilary Mantel’s writing and, with some urgency, on the key conservationists Barry Lopez and Rachel Carson.

Finally, a challenge to all of us, though specifically to Trinity College Dublin’s historical society, where she was once an invited guest: Tell. The. Truth.