Margaret Atwood – My Own RE:public

And the winner is…

…all the books listed and fiction and lovers of the same one could say, but (with the exception of last year!) there can only be one winner of The 2020 Booker Prize, and that is Shuggie Bain, written by Douglas Stuart.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

On the BBC Radio 4 “Front Row” page there is (for the moment at least) a video of last night’s event hosted by John Wilson, in that hybrid digital mix – in person, far away, on tape – that we have become more use to than we would like this year – nominees keeping their distance, and others likewise, and Wilson, Margaret Busby and Bernadine Evaristo at the “Round House” in Camden. But I must say all were stoical, and found a very fine tone.

Margaret Busby, reminds me that her work as a publisher over decades has been instrumental in the diversification of talent, especially Black talent, in the UK – it may be only now that she sees, we see, the fruits of her labour. Evaristo, as representative of this. And Ishiguro and Atwood, that a Booker is nice but a body of work is better. President Obama – he, presumably responsible for the rescheduling – prompts me to remember at least of one of the reasons I forgive him his shortcomings: his love of books, and belief in the power of fiction. The Duchess of Cornwall; that royal patronage is not without its virtues, and you can love horses and Charles and also words.

Forget the gripe about the transatlantic bias, what a “great looking” group it was zooming in from afar, what choice readings we heard; more than enough reasons to read their work. Given the difficulties of this year, the Booker has done a very good job, and their jury to be congratulated.

A dedicated reading

I have always noted with interest the dedication and epigraph of a book – to whom if anyone – precise or otherwise (“To A.B.C. with love”!), sincere or ironic, inspirational or nonsensical. Sometimes they may mean nothing to anyone other than the author, but sometimes they are revealing (I think this is called paratextual).

My attention recently diverted to thinking about Puritans (who I have never thought much about before!), I recalled Margaret Atwood’s dedication of The Handmaid’s Tale to the historian Perry Miller (and Mary Webster – an Atwood ancestor and victim of the Salem witch trials!) who so impressed her whilst at Harvard in the early sixties.

Confounded somewhat about how those first Puritans could reemerge so diabolically in her Republic of Gilead (and at the same time dwell in the good spirit of a Reverend Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel), and fairly ignorant to colonial New England history, and absolutely to the theological dimensions, I have resolved therefore to pursue a little of my own research (over time!). And a starting point may well be at least some reading of Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Quite how far I will get I don’t know; it does seem somewhat daunting!

I have wondered though about that “Historical Note” that bookended rather than framed Atwood’s novel, and I think I can see that this literary device may have been influenced by what she took from Miller all those years ago; something perhaps like history to be seen in continuity, as inherited over and over, and inextricably embellished all the way along with the set of beliefs of the historian and his or her time. Atwood characterises her (rather obnoxious) historian as one analysing the past from the physical and intellectual coordinates of his present; oblivious that all these 200 years on he is carrying all the baggage from those two centuries. For Miller I think that meant that the Puritanism of colonial New England had only previously been understood in evidential terms, rather than conceding that the history being told was affected by the America of the ensuing years and the present.

And then there is Atwood’s “Gilead”

orig_cover_02 — Cover of 1st edition of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Not too long ago, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and so it’s hardly any wonder that while reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel I was very much struck by these two very different fictional places being called Gilead – on the one hand Atwood’s dystopian rogue nation and on the other Robinson’s small town anywhere. Certainly, both are American, of a sort; one most definitely imagined, a pessimistic vision. And the other? A place of hope, romanticised like a prairie legend. And both are the scene for patriarchal narratives, albeit of a very different nature, and the biblical reference that lends both their name can be interpreted such as to justify the respective authorial intent. But the diabolical darkness of one is so contrary to the simple human failings and joys of the other, that one is tempted to take note and look not much deeper. But it was the coincidence (?) of place name that interested me, and the parallels that are exposed I find revealing and worthy of some thought.

gileadcover — Cover of the first edition of *Gilead* by Marilynne Robinson

Firstly, going back to the name. Gilead means “hill of testimony” – at least that is one accepted meaning – and both narratives are presented as testimonies – from a dying Rev. Ames and a handmaid (Offred) on the run (we think!) – and both tell their stories in that temporal fragmented way particular to memory. And as I said above, one just can’t get pass the generations of men and the societies they have defined; be it as men of God offering their interpretations of church and Godliness on a patch of Mid-western earth, or as degenerate Sons of Jacob perverting religion and taking the notion of patriarchy to its radical end in a Godless New England.

It also interests me that, like Atwood’s Handmaids and Commanders, Lila is so much younger than the good Reverend Ames, and this follows the Biblical narratives of old men and young women (especially the Israelite patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), and both stories are driven by fertility, not just of man and woman but also of the land and its habitability and production affected by contamination and climate (and one could ask, where lies the fault: with the sins of man or by the will of God). This latter, this equating the people with the land works for both narratives and, as Ames’ would say, that is a wonder.