Interview: Ahead of her Dublin visit, Margaret Atwood talks to Louise East about her new book, a version of The Odyssey according to Penelope
Twelve women adorn the back cover of Margaret Atwood's latest book, The Penelopiad. Twelve dead women, to be precise, their hair long and stringy, their feet dangling as uselessly as long-dead fish. These are the 12 maids hanged on Odysseus's return in Homer's The Odyssey, a murder so strange and motiveless it has long piqued Atwood's interest.
"The maids bothered me right from when I first read The Odyssey when I was 15," she says. "The reasons for their being hanged do not seem sufficient for the horrible deaths they undergo. So I went back and looked for what exactly they had done. And it all looked a bit fishy to me."
As the title suggests, The Penelopiad is The Odyssey according to Penelope, the archetypal long-suffering wife who waits patiently at home while Odysseus lays siege to Troy, fights monsters and sleeps with beautiful goddesses. In Atwood's version, the suffering is just as long but patience is running a little short as Penelope stomps around the underworld, humorously delivering her own anarchic version of events, including a chilling rationale for the death of those maids.
"You look beyond the story you're presented with, 'version A' you could call it, because version A is never the whole story," Atwood says simply.
Atwood, who will read at Dublin's Liberty Hall tomorrow, is quick to point out that when James Joyce plundered the myth of Odysseus for Ulysses, he had little time for Homer's pliable and constant Penelope: "Molly Bloom is one of the other Penelopes." Yet for the most part, Homer's Penelope is a poster girl for modesty and monogamy: "She spends a lot of time weeping, a lot of time waiting, a lot of time weaving. And the rest of the time she spends sleeping."
To Atwood, whose 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is the ultimate what-if attack on patriarchy, this traditional idea of Penelope was something of a red rag. "When I thought about Penelope looking back over those 20 years [of Odysseus's absence], I asked myself: 'What's she been doing? Who's been running the show?' It has to have been her. There was no standing army. Her son, Telemachus, was only a teenager. She did a lot more than sit around and cry."
This is exactly the kind of left-field response publisher Jamie Byng was hoping for when he first dreamed up the Canongate Myths series. Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Karen Armstrong are the first authors to have taken up his challenge to retell a myth in whatever way they saw fit (Atwood insists Byng jumped out from behind a gorse bush in Edinburgh and persuaded her). Tales by Chinua Achebe, Donna Tartt, AS Byatt and Milton Hatoum are also in the pipeline.
"To begin with, I wasn't sure what the full shape of the series would be, and I'm still not," says Byng, who has already put out a series of books from the Bible, introduced by everyone from Bono to the Dalai Lama. "All I know is that from a very young age, myths were mesmerising to me. People came to the Bible books with these very personal responses which in turn opened up a new perspective to the reader. The leap wasn't that big from the Bible series to this."
It's an idea that makes perfect sense to Atwood. "People have been using mythic material as long as there's been mythic material to use," she says.
Citing previous examples of the form, such as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ("luminous and rather sweet"), Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida ("very cynical"), Christopher Logue's recent Iliad translation, Cold Calls, and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, Atwood points out: "On the human smorgasbord there are many story patterns, but they are limited in number. If we were cats we'd have different story patterns involving a lot of birds and mice and other cats, just as our set of stories mainly concerns the life of human beings. We can look at the whole myth pattern as a giant map to the human psyche; what it is that we wish for, what it is that we fear."
Unlike the ancient Greeks, though, not all of Atwood's contemporary audience are well-versed in myth's back-story.
"You do have to build a bit of explanation in," she says. "Odysseus's two best god friends are Hermes and Pallas Athene. For the Greeks, that would have been enough. They'd know that if Hermes helps Odysseus, then Odysseus is a tricky guy. He's a traveller, he's a thief, he's got a golden tongue. Greeks would have known not to play cards with him - he'll cheat."
Atwood's first thought after Byng's gorse-side ambush was to work with North American mythology, but after several failed attempts, she gave up.
"I almost backed out of the contract," she says. "Cue frosty silence from my agent. So I said I'd give it three weeks."
During those three weeks, the poor dead maids kicked the way into her consciousness.
"It just comes to you in the bath, that eureka moment," she says. "Everyone will tell you the same thing . . . You're working on the wrong thing, you give it up and then the right thing presents itself. I don't know how that works."
The silenced maids finally get to speak in The Penelopiad in the form of sea shanties, skipping rhymes and ballads (not for nothing has Atwood written 13 volumes of verse as well as novels, criticism and children's writing), each of which are interspersed with Penelope's dispatches from the brilliantly dreary underworld.
"It's not a fun place, but you do meet people down there that you know," says Atwood, as though describing her own experience of a particularly tedious cocktail party. "It wasn't like heaven, even for people who had been quite good."
The Penelopiad is not Atwood's first foray into the past: Alias Grace breathed life into a 19th-century Canadian murder case, while The Blind Assassin, which won the 2000 Booker Prize, zipped between the 1930s and today. Yet she is probably better known for her futuristic dystopias, such as The Handmaid's Tale and 2003's Oryx and Crake, which she describes as "speculative fiction". ("Science fiction," she has said, "has monsters and spaceships.")
For Atwood, whose present is spent in Toronto with her long-term partner, novelist Graeme Gibson, writing about the future is "a way of looking at human behaviour. It's a way of saying, well, do we like this path that we appear to be on? Is this where we want to go?".
It's not lost on her that the Christian fundamentalism prevalent in present-day America was neatly predicted in The Handmaid's Tale, and she says that since avian flu has started mutating in a disturbing echo of Oryx and Crake, people have been looking at her "in that funny way again. They're saying, well, which future are we going to get [Oryx and Crake or The Handmaid's Tale], and I say, well, we may very well get both at once".
"We had a little peek of what might happen during the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe," she adds. "People were not organised. They weren't ready. Just multiply that and think of the result. The things we think of as freedoms for women in western society are pretty recent. Some of them aren't even 100 years old. Under what circumstances would people want to get rid of them? Bring on a bit of chaos and watch them go.'
Margaret Atwood and Karen Armstrong will be reading from The Penelopiad and A Short History of Myth tomorrow at 7pm in Liberty Hall, Dublin. For details, contact Waterstone's, tel: 01-6791415
Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is published by Canongate, £12