The more you know

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 12 Comments

Speaking with reporters after QP yesterday, Pat Martin explains himself.

Well, you can never go wrong according to Margaret Atwood and she made a presentation in 1987 to a parliamentary committee on the free-trade agreement, where she in fact invoked the legend that a beaver, when threatened, will in fact bite off its own testicles and present them to its tormentor. I now know it isn’t true as I’ve actually trapped beavers in the Yukon territory, helped trappers trap beavers and apparently the story started because beavers are one of the only mammals that carry their genitals – their male genitals within themselves. There’s no exterior presence as it were.

Who cares about libraries?

By John Geddes - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Andrew Tolson

To hear the uproar in Toronto, an avid book borrower might be forgiven for imagining that Canadian libraries are coming under financial siege. The administration of the city’s right-leaning, populist mayor, Rob Ford, is taking a hard look at closing branches of the Toronto Public Library to cut costs. That prospect has drawn fire from novelist Margaret Atwood and director Norman Jewison, and sparked petitions and angry public meetings. The debate will continue as the city’s budget deliberations stretch into the fall. News from abroad gives Toronto library enthusiasts ample reason to be worried—state and local spending squeezes have led to closures or curtailed hours in the U.S., and British libraries are also struggling.

Yet top Canadian librarians do not see the Toronto scrap as a sign that the international malaise has arrived here. They point to upbeat developments in other Canadian cities. Just when Atwood was launching her Twitter war with Ford in late July, Calgary’s city council voted to earmark $135 million for a new central library, along with $40 million it had already set aside for the ambitious project. The oil field capital will have to build a spectacular temple to books to outshine Surrey, B.C., which is slated to open its curvaceous, Bing Thom-designed, $36-million City Centre Library later this month, or Halifax, which is spending $55 million on a European-inspired, architecturally adventurous downtown library, slated to open in early 2014.

These and other gleaming new libraries are only the most obvious indicators of seemingly solid political support for free reading. “The economic situation in the U.S. has seen some serious library casualties,” says Karen Adams, president of the Canadian Library Association and the University of Manitoba’s director of libraries. “But Canada has been spared most of those kinds of stresses.” One reason is the comparative health of public finances in Canada, where government deficits are generally less crushing than in other rich countries. As well, aversion among Canadian politicians to taxation to fund services is far less fervid than in the U.S.

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Newsmakers: July 28-August 4

By Alex Ballingall, Cigdem Iltan and Richard Warnica - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Rex Features/CP

‘I’ll take “What the heck?” for $200, Alex’

As host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek has all the answers. But when it comes to late-night feats of bravery, his performance falls a bit short. The 71-year-old was in San Francisco last week to host the National Geographic World Championship when a burglar crept into his room and nabbed some cash and a family heirloom. He gave chase, but after a few steps his Achilles tendon snapped and he crumpled (the burglar was later nabbed by security in the hotel lobby). After hobbling onstage on crutches later that day, Trebek recounted the incident in Jeopardy! style: “The answer is, at 2:30 yesterday morning, chasing a burglar down the hall at my San Francisco hotel until my Achilles tendon ruptured and I fell in an ignominious heap to the carpeting.”

An Iron Maiden gets his wings

Just a year after discount airline Iceland Express discontinued its short-lived route from Winnipeg to Reykjavik due to spewing ash from the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the weekly flight is back. But this time, it rocks: Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, will be piloting some of those flights. Not only will the 52-year-old rocker—also a licensed commercial pilot—be flying the planes, he’ll fly one of the band’s planes from their 2010 tour, still painted in Iron Maiden’s colours. “I never intended to become a professional pilot,” Dickinson explained to the National Post, “but as I became more curious about aircraft, and, well, not being John Travolta, I realized that the only way I was ever going to fly a jet was if I got a job!”

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Ready to wrap

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 1 Comment

James Cameron; Céline Dion; Ryan Reynolds | Roger Kisby/Christopher Polk/Matt Carr/Getty Images

Céline Dion
The new mom of twins gets two Metro Babycotpod cribs ($595), a “Bandit” Doll ($65) from Vancouver’s the Cross (ships across Canada) and a Hudson’s Bay blanket, to keep her Canuck roots strong. For René Jr., the start of a broader musical education: “Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings” (Columbia/Legacy, $130).

Naomi Campbell
Infamous for her blood diamonds, compliments of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, the supermodel could use some conflict-free bling: ethically sourced sapphires and Canadian diamonds from Brilliant Earth ($1,150).

Glenn Beck
A tea kettle, of course. How about this Michael Graves design from Alessi, along with a sample of soothing herbal brews? As for all those righteous tears, Beck could use a fresh pile of Paul Smith handkerchiefs ($42), all 100 per cent woven cotton. This striped one is nice, though he might also like the white one that says: “Bless You.”

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Bird-huggers vs. tree-huggers

By Andrew Potter - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

John Alex Maguire/Rex Features/CP

If her recent writing is anything to go by, Margaret Atwood is seriously worried about the future of the human race. In her novels Oryx and Crake and its successor, Year of the Flood, she deals with the apocalyptic themes of runaway technology, the commodification of the body, and environmental devastation. She always describes her work as “speculative fiction” that explores the consequences of social trends that are already underway.

But if her recent environmental activism is any indication, Margaret Atwood appears to think that everything is more or less peachy. At the very least, global warming doesn’t appear to her to be anything worth sacrificing a few birds or a nice view over.

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News will never be the same

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the end of an era. Kory Teneycke is hanging up his battered fedora. The clatter of his trusty Remington manual falls silent. It feels like it was only a few months ago that he was putting his feet up on his desk for the first time as vice-president of business development at Quebecor Media, with the aim of launching its Sun TV News network. Back when a newsman was a newsman.

Then came the glory days. Memories. When you tell these kids nowadays about Teneycke’s epic Twitter war with Margaret Atwood, they don’t understand. That was what we called “hard news and straight talk.” We went to sleep not knowing if Russian jets might swoop down in the night, or at least come somewhere close to Canadian airspace. A kid named Baird was just a transport minister dreaming House leader dreams.

And so we in this crazy business reach for the brown paper bags secreted in the bottom drawers of our desks to raise a toast to one of our own. They don’t make ‘em like him anymore.

Mitchel Raphael on why kids love spending time at Paul Martinland

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Don’t tell the PMO they helped him
When Liberal MP Glen Pearson gave his children a choice of summer holiday—either Disney World in Florida or to the home of former prime minister Paul Martin, an hour outside Montreal in the Eastern Townships—the kids said, “Paul Martin’s.” (In the end he took them to both places.) Paul Martin has a pond with a trampoline that the kids love jumping on. His property also has a golf course and the kids like riding on the golf carts. Pearson is not a golfer but his wife, Jane Roy, is. Summer trips to Martin’s home are becoming a Pearson family tradition. Martin is the one who convinced Pearson to enter politics and, jokes the Ontario MP, “I have cursed him ever since.”

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Top 10 Canadian books of the decade

By Brian Bethune - Friday, December 11, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 8 Comments

10. Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan (2002)
MacMillan’s revisionist take on the peace treaty that ended the First World War—and gave the world such ongoing headaches as Yugoslavia and Iraq—is a triumph of narrative history, one that downplays anonymous “historical forces” to place individuals like Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George back where they belong, at the centre of events.

9. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)
No one has ever found an easy way to sum up Martel’s novel, a surprise—but highly popular—Booker prize winner. That’s only to be expected, considering the storyline: take one teenaged boy—a devout Hindu who also prays to Jesus, Mary and Allah—put him on a lifeboat for some seven months with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan (all soon to disappear) and an enormous Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (who causes the disappearances). A long, strange trip indeed, “something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses,” as Pi himself says about life in general.

8. This Is My Country, What’s Yours? by Noah Richler (2006)
There are an endless number of lesser matters to quibble over in Richler’s monumental literary atlas of Canada—one of the many great things about the book—but there’s no quarreling with the main themes of this shrewd and subtle consideration of CanLit. Canada is an anti-epic society, born of struggle with an unforgiving land, highly skeptical about authority, and fertile ground for ironic and individualistic novels.

7. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (2007)
Hill has been a very good writer for a long time, a graceful and understated stylist whose latest novel turns a thorny historical subject—the fate of black slaves who served the British in the American Revolution only to be shabbily betrayed in Nova Scotia—into a tour-de-force, an entire era personalized in one superbly realized female character.

6. River Thieves by Michael Crummey (2001)
Historical fiction is one of the dominant themes within CanLit, and there’s no more subtle and profoundly self-aware example than Crummey’s first novel. The weight of the extinction of the Beothuks, Newfoundland’s aboriginal population and the impossibility of truly understanding the past, hang over this story of mutual and tragic misunderstanding.

5. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden (2005)
Nothing haunts the national historical imagination like the Great War. The eternal Canadian novel, the one we keep writing over and over again, is set, at least in part, against the mud and carnage of the Western front. Boyden’s first novel, the tale of two Cree snipers—one broken in body and spirit, the other destroyed morally—is perhaps the finest in a rich tradition.

4. There is a Season by Patrick Lane (2004)
The poet’s account of a year in his life and garden begins when Lane, then 65, was barely two months out of the rehab centre he entered after 45 years of heavy drinking. Memory floods him, much of it harsh to recall (and to read), but there are “moments of such joy that to remember them makes me reel through the thin air of the past.” An exquisite memoir, beautiful in its prose and terrifying in its honesty.

3. Where War Lives by Paul Watson (2007)
The author is the Toronto-born foreign correspondent who snapped the famous 1993 photo of U.S. Army Sgt. William Cleveland’s mutilated corpse being dragged in triumph by a howling mob through Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu. The book is Watson’s account—utterly devoid of self-pity and propelled by an apocalyptic mix of anger, guilt and post-traumatic shock—of the interplay of media and war, and his life since Cleveland’s spirit spoke to him that day: “If you do this, I will own you forever.”

2. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaetan Soucy (2000)
Few anglophone readers know the work of Soucy; a pity, really, given he’s a writer of genius. This slim novel has more layers of meaning than most far fatter volumes can imagine. A word-drunk, hallucinatory, heartbreaking story of two isolated siblings adrift in a surreal landscape after their abusive father’s suicide.

How faithful do you need to be?

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 3 Comments

The English and those who trace their lineage, or at least their language, to Shakespeare’s sceptred isle, have always loved the Tudor era. It’s short and tidy (just three generations of rulers), full of sex and blood (Henry VIII and all those wives), exciting moments of glory (Francis Drake) and high art (Shakespeare). Hundreds of popular novels—not to mention hit TV series—have been set in the period, many of them, author Hilary Mantel waspishly notes, excuses to write about “sex and violence and the war between men and women—a lot of cheap romantic fiction.” All that goes a long way to explaining why Wolf Hall, Mantel’s massive novel of Thomas Cromwell, the royal official who masterminded Henry VIII’s first divorce and break with Rome, was always the favourite to take the Booker prize—bookies set their odds by bettors’ wagers, not by their literary opinions. It does not, however, explain why the novel actually won the Booker.

The vexing question of genre fiction—mystery, horror, romance, science fiction, fantasy and historical, to name the most prominent—doesn’t so much divide readers, critics and prize juries as confuse them. The barriers between genres are porous—romance-mysteries are common—and the line between the genres and literary fiction, which is what is supposed to be celebrated by the prestigious prizes, is in the eye of the beholder. Perceptions can turn on a writer’s reputation. Someone who made her name in historical fiction wouldn’t stand a chance, however good her work, of a Booker nomination. Mantel, though, is a well-regarded author whose seven previous novels have settings as diverse as present-day Saudi Arabia and Paris during the Terror. In short, a literary writer who sometimes mines the past. It helps even more to be Margaret Atwood. Her Oryx and Crake is beautifully written, scathingly intelligent—and pure science fiction. But that didn’t stop the Giller jury from shortlisting it in 2003. Continue…

Not all eyes are on the Prizes

By Noah Richler - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—and, this year, Michael Crummey’s Galore. What a fabulous Giller list, a litany of some of the best (and bestselling) Canadian novels of the last several years—but not one of them shortlisted for the prize! Drat.

Instead we must debate these five—Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, Colin McAdam’s Fall, and Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault—and, if you’re into the game of it, whose choices they might be. Linden MacIntyre? An Alistair MacLeod pick, surely. Anne Michaels? Victoria Glendinning, chair of the Booker bunch that gave Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient half the prize, must have backed her floating prose, no? And Kim Echlin’s Cambodian romp—well, isn’t Russell Banks a fan of the Caribbean and other steamy, politically charged places? And who, tell me, is the one who cares for McAdam’s libidinous and truncated teen dialogue? Continue…

Sister Atwood's traveling salvation show

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

The audience looks just like a Margaret Atwood crowd should. A CanLit casual mix of grad students, people carrying bike helmets, the hard of hearing, and older women who bear an uncanny resemblance to the country’s marquee author. Tilley hats stowed safely in backpacks, they sit shoulder to shoulder in the pews of a deconsecrated Ottawa church, clutching glasses of white wine and trying to avoid the disapproving gaze of Christ still nailed high on his cross. It’s an atmosphere of anticipation—downright giddy by Upper Canadian standards—as they await the North American debut of the buzzy road show promoting Atwood’s new novel The Year of the Flood. A book tour like no other.

The lights go down, a cowbell sounds, and a choir starts a shabby procession down the aisle. Dressed in tattered robes, they carry chalkboards emblazoned with slogans like “Animals R Us,” and “Don’t Eat Death!” Their sweet voices are united in a mournful, minor-key hymn. “ ’Twas once the finest Garden / That ever has been seen / And in it God’s dear Creatures / Did swim and fly and play / But then came greedy Spoilers / And killed them all away.” Continue…

Margaret Atwood didn’t kill me

By Rebecca Eckler - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 6:00 PM - 13 Comments

I’ve achieved literary immortality. Sadly, it had nothing to do with the four books I’ve written or any of my countless newspaper, magazine and blog columns. It was made possible by the woman sitting across from me, sipping an organic soy latte with honey. Margaret Atwood. Or Peggy Atwood. I’m not sure which one I like more. Margaret Atwood is why I wanted to write. I’ve read and reread all her books. I send Peggy emails about boy troubles. “My goodness, why don’t you just send him an email and be done with it?” she’ll write back. Or I’ll tell Peggy I was stung by a bee while pumping gas. Peggy responds with, “Oh dear. Public gas station? It may not have been a bee. Maybe a wasp? There are many kinds. May not have been a honeybee, if bee. Did you keep its tiny corpse?” Peggy will read my palm and always signs her emails with “Xm.” Not exactly the way people might imagine the woman described by many as “among the most brilliant writers of English.”

Two years ago, I bid $7,000 at a charity auction to have my name in Atwood’s next book. (I promised I wouldn’t buy shoes for two years.) Now, the book is out. Called The Year of The Flood, it is by far my favourite of all Atwood’s novels. When I send Atwood an email telling her I’m loving it, she writes back, “Well that’s very nice to hear . . . could NOT be because you’re in it!” All Atwood had told me before I got the book to read was that I “don’t die,” which is “always a good thing.” Continue…

Margaret Atwood goes on tour, Anna Wintour thaws, and the director of fun

By Lianne George - Friday, August 28, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Atwood nuts, rejoice
Canadian novelist and soothsayer Margaret Atwood has embarked on an international tour to promote her latest book, The Year of the Flood. As part of her campaign, she will be writing a blog to keep fans up to date on her toing and froing. In her inaugural posting, she welcomes her visitors with a photo: “Here is a picture of me in the garden with giant phlox, before starting out. Will I shrink during the tour? Will I survive it?” She also lays out some ground rules for making her tour as green as possible—for instance, placing special emphasis on train travel, local foods and organic, fair-trade coffees. She plans to pack light: “think pink, pack black. It dirts less.” Finally, she says she will take “the VegiVows” for the duration of her tour, “with the exception of non-avian and non-mammalian bioforms once a week.” She will, however, permit eggs, “viewed as a sort of nut.”

Swedish for retaliation
When the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet ran an article accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinian youths to harvest and sell their organs, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu compared the allegations to medieval “blood libels,” which claimed that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in holy rituals. “Statements in the Swedish press were outrageous,” an official quoted Netanyahu as saying. “We are not expecting an apology—we are expecting a condemnation.” Swedish officials have so far refused to condemn the article. Until they do, Israel is prohibiting any new Swedish journalists from entering the country, which is small comfort to many angry Israelis. Concerned citizens have launched an online petition to go after the Swedes where it hurts—a nationwide boycott of Ikea. Continue…

Autistic licence

By Brian Bethune - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 13 Comments

On a 2006 episode of House, Fox’s popular TV drama about the misanthropic medical genius played by Hugh Laurie, Gregory House has to solve the troubling case of an autistic child. Is the 10-year-old boy screaming because he has an untreated physical ailment about which he can’t communicate, or because, well, as most of House’s team believe, that’s what severely autistic children do? House eventually saves the day, of course, but the specific illness of the week was not the real plot point. That turned on the question, now unavoidable to House’s colleagues, on whether their resident savant—sarcastic, brutally blunt, virtually friendless and utterly devoid of social niceties as he is—was himself autistic: specifically, did he have Asperger’s syndrome, the best known of the diagnoses at the high-functioning end of autism spectrum disorders?

The answer to that is left hanging, but were the good doctor to be diagnosed with any ASD, he would be just one of many such characters in recent pop culture—one of many such beloved characters. From the runaway success of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with its autistic teen hero Christopher Boone, to Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan and her assistant Zack Addy—two Asperger’s characters on one show—of Fox’s TV drama Bones, to Lisbeth Salander, the electrifying Asperger’s heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, viewers and readers have taken to a series of endearingly offbeat ASD protagonists, if not to the 10-year-old screaming in the corner. It’s all part of autism’s new normal, at least as it’s portrayed in pop culture, variously described by those who approve as evidence of growing social acceptance of “neurological diversity,” and by those less impressed as “our strange fetishization of Asperger’s.” Continue…

'Genesis' by Bernard Beckett

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 4:51 PM - 3 Comments

Bernard Beckett, 41 (or possibly 42), is a New Zealand high school teacher who has written eight (or is it nine?) novels for young adults. Accounts, to put it mildly, vary: Beckett is not exactly well-known outside his native land, a lamentable state of affairs—at least for foreigners—that’s liable to change very rapidly. Genesis, Beckett’s whatever number novel, written in 2006 and now available across the English-speaking world, is superb: a taut, thrilling, thought-provoking dystopia, just perfect for intellectually curious teens, and pretty damn good for adults too. And virtually all it consists of is conversation, a Socratic question-and-answer session between Anaximander, a young candidate for her society’s ruling Academy, and her examiners.

It takes place in late 21^st-century New Zealand, now re-named the Republic after a reforming leader, Plato. It doesn’t need any further name, because it’s the last functioning state on earth, the rest having fallen to environmental catastrophe, nuclear war and endless waves of plague. The Republic has maintained itself at a cost: soldiers manning a giant seawall shoot down any refugees approaching by boat or plane; there is no individual liberty and all citizens function within their assigned roles.
Then comes a new Adam, young Adam Foote, the subject of Anax’s historian’s thesis, and the first Republican in decades to act independently. He ends up imprisoned, sentenced to become the human participant in an experiment with a new form of artificial intelligence named Artfink. Anax’s increasingly off-kilter conversation with the three Academy examiners reconstruct Adam and Artfink’s interaction, and raise millennia-old, never-to-be-solved questions about meaning and consciousness: what, if anything, really separates us from animals and machines?

Genesis is beautifully written, with an eye-popping conclusion, but what really makes it stand out is its bottom-line difference from other, and more famous, dystopias like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worldor Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The difference lies not in the how of our fate—human greed and folly pretty much sums that up—but in the why of it. Most dystopias are dire warnings, allegories of now, that implicitly argue there’s still time to change. In Beckett’s novel, disaster takes on a kind of tragic inevitability, leading humanity down a path that’s as strangely triumphant as it is squalid. As Anax says of those men who made one particularly fateful decision: “Circumstances conspired against them.”

Atwood sees all

By Rebecca Eckler - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments

How did Margaret Atwood know my clothes dryer wasn’t working? There has been much written, in recent months, about Atwood’s “prophetic vision” and her ability to be eerily “prescient.” That’s because her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was published just before the stock market free fall and mortgage meltdowns. (Before that was her timely theme of female suppression in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake, her dystopian novel that collided with the SARS outbreak.)

Either Atwood was born under a lucky star or she really should be moonlighting from a shady storefront with a sign that says “Palm Readings: $25.”

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Megapundit: Ottawa's accountant vs. Washington's poet

By selley - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 2:37 PM - 14 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh on Obama’s geneaology; Dan Gardner takes on Margaret F***ing Atwood; Don Martin on Canadian asbestos; Rick Salutin on Stéphane Dion.

Get over it
Some pundits are turning their gaze to the future. Others can’t stop post-morteming the election.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin understands just how impossible Canadian politicians feel it is to kill 700 jobs in a nation of 33 million people just to save a bunch of lives in the third world, but is baffled at “how Canada can argue that a commodity the government says is too dangerous to permit on domestic construction sites is okeedokee for a developing world where safety measures are far less stringent.” He speaks, naturally, of asbestos. And while he concedes a distinction must be drawn between “the old toxic fibre they’re extracting from office walls and the lower-health-risk asbestos they’re exporting as a cement additive,” he says scientists and doctors make a rather compelling case for caution. The least the government could do, he very reasonably suggests, is stop actively marketing the stuff and release the Health Canada-commissioned report on the subject that was delivered to them months ago. (The Post‘s editorial board and Terence Corcoran take the contrarian view on this.)

The Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe speaks to Michael Byers, who had his academic cap handed to him in Vancouver Centre by Hedy Fry (and Lorne Mayencourt, for that matter), about what he learned from life on the campaign trail. Among other things, he tells her, “I now realize the demands of political debating, how difficult it is to perform at that level. As an armchair quarterback, it’s easy to criticize and focus on weaknesses.” Interestingly enough, that’s something we’ve felt like saying to Mr. Byers ourselves on a few occasions…

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Hurts like the Dickens

By Margaret Atwood - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

In her book, Payback: Debt and the Dark Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood deals with the manifold concepts of debt in our lives, from its prehuman beginnings (even chimpanzees understand the notions of fairness and reciprocity) through its religious, literary, governmental and financial roles. In its final section, she arrives at “Payback”: what happens when the orgy ends, when the wealth—monetary and natural—is consumed, and the collection agency is at the door. In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge learned, in the nick of time, all about the varied meanings of payback. Atwood wonders if her Scrooge, Scrooge Nouveau, will be so lucky:

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?

In my part of the world, we have a ritual interchange that goes like this: First person: “Lovely weather we’re having.” Second person: “We’ll pay for it later.”

My part of the world being Canada, where there is a great deal of weather and many varieties of it, we always do pay for it later. As one person commented, “That’s not Canadian, it’s just Presbyterian.” Nevertheless, it’s a widespread saying.

What this ritual interchange reveals is a larger habit of thinking about the more enjoyable things in life: they’re only on loan or acquired on credit, and sooner or later the date when they must be paid for will roll around. And that is what this is about: pay-up time. Or payback time, supposing that you haven’t paid up. In any case, the time when whatever is on one side of the balance is weighed against what is on the other side—whether it’s your heart, your soul, or your debts—and the final reckoning is made.

Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due. Otherwise the creditor would never be able to collect, and would therefore never lend anything, and the whole system of borrowing and repaying would stop cold. In the financial services industries, the due date is written right on the mortgage or the loan papers or the credit card agreement. You must pay by that date, or you’ll have to renew the loan; or, if you go overtime on your credit card charges, the interest rate shoots up, and then things can quickly get unpleasant.

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge has had a reprieve. He’s been given extra time—an extra life, in fact. And now he will use it to pay back what he’s taken; to make, as he says, “amends.”

Let’s pause here to ponder the derivation of the word “amends.” It comes from a word that originally meant a payment, in money or goods, for something you’d done wrong. By making amends, then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dickens’s view, he owes it to his fellow man: he’s been on the take from others all his life—that’s where his fortune has come from—but he’s never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it’s this realization that’s at the core of his transformation. Money isn’t the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circulate—just as they do among chimpanzees—for any social system to remain in balance.

So let’s contemplate Scrooge as he would be if he were among us in the early 21st century. I’ll call this one Scrooge Nouveau, because when you’re introducing a high-end quality product it’s just as well to make it sound a little French. Scrooge Nouveau is the same age as Dickens’s Scrooge Original, but he doesn’t look it. He looks much younger, because, unlike Scrooge Original, he does spend his money: he spends it on himself. So he’s had a hair transplant, and some facial adjustment, and his skin is tanned from the many voyages he’s taken on his private yacht, and his very white and expertly restored teeth gleam eerily in the dark.

Some of Scrooge Nouveau’s wealth has gone to the four ex-Mrs. Scrooges that feature so prominently in celebrity magazines about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Two of these ex-wives have given bitchy tell-all interviews about Scrooge, who likes this kind of attention, in moderation, because he likes anything about himself. But it’s not his fault that he’s a self-centred narcissist: he grew up surrounded by ads that told him he was worth it, and that he owed it to himself. He’s on his fifth Mrs. Scrooge now. She’s 22, a stunning girl with very long legs. He owes it to himself, because he’s worth it.

Feeling the pinch

By John Fraser - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Despite all the planning and the forward strategies, despite two years’ advance notice, despite a crack team of eager broadcasters, publishers and editors, and academics, the 2008 Massey Lecture with Margaret Atwood turned out to be a heroic scramble thanks primarily to the U.S. election and the bizarre strategies of American publishers.

Huh?

Less than a year ago, Ms. Atwood handed the manuscript of her latest novel to her agent and scored off her appointment book for the ensuing fall (i.e., right now) to handle international promotional trips. Her fame has spread to so many countries, and her audiences for readings and guest appearances are so fevered, she is pretty close to being the reigning rock star of contemporary literature.

Then Barack Obama made his historic announcement that he would run for the presidency of the United States, along with Hillary Clinton, and the U.S. publishers decided politics would so dominate the fall of 2008 that they didn’t want to spoil the chances of hitting the big time with one of their most successful authors. Atwood’s book was put off for a year and the organizers of the Massey Lectures—a triumvirate of CBC Radio’s Ideas, House of Anansi publishers, and Massey College in the University of Toronto—were suddenly left in something of a panic.

Atwood had been contracted to do the 2009 Massey Lecture and now there was a conflict with the publication date of her new novel. The Masseys, as they are more familiarly known, are not just a romp in the garden. They are five connected lectures presented sequentially on five university campuses on a two-week author tour across the country. There’s a simultaneous book publication by Anansi, and the senior partner in this trio—CBC Radio—broadcasts the recorded lectures shortly afterwards over the national network.

No one quite knew what to do. That’s because something very special was at stake. When the Massey Lectures were first created in 1961, they were conceived as a focus on important contemporary issues by leading thinkers that would also be honouring the first Canadian-born governor general, Vincent Massey. From the beginning, the lectures were meant to be an extended intellectual conversation with the Canadian listening audience, and some of them became international hits, right from the first one (Rich Nations, Poor Nations by Barbara Ward Jackson) to some of the most recent (Jean Vanier’s Becoming Human and Richard Wright’s The Short History of Progress). Some Massey Lectures remain standard-bearers, both in Canada and internationally: Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination, for example, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning.

In the beginning, the lecturer wrote the book-length series and was stuck inside a radio studio in Toronto for days as the producers recorded the words. These earliest efforts sometimes sounded as dead as if they were coming from the land of Lethe. It wasn’t really until the current team at CBC’s Ideas, headed by executive producer Bernie Lucht, started pushing away at renewal that the Masseys took on a vibrant, contemporary feel.

Maclean’s Interview: Margaret Atwood

By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Q: Your new book is called Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Of all the things you could be writing about—at this point in your career, the whole world’s open to you—you chose to write about money.

A: No, I chose to write about debt. It’s a different thing. Debt is not just a money thing. It’s about owing and being owed. Money is just one thing you can exchange. You can exchange good deeds, you can exchange revenge, you can exchange murders. I said to some guy today, “Okay, the simplest form of it is you open the door for somebody and they don’t say thank you. How do you feel?” He said, “That happened to me this morning. I was mad.” I said, “Right, because you knew you had not been repaid. You had done something for that person and they had not reciprocated with the social stroke that should have been coming to you.”

Q: Clearly, these are primitive feelings. You write at length in the book about how our fellow primates respond to experiments testing their sense of fairness and indebtedness.

A: Is it fair that one monkey gets a grape for handing over the very same pebble for which another monkey only gets a cucumber? And obviously it’s not fair because the monkey with the cucumber gets mad. And with a troop of chimpanzees it’s favour-trading. You know, I help you against her and then I ask for your help in return and if you don’t give it, I get very angry, because the scale is out of balance. You owe me and you’re not paying. You blew me off!

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