Edinburgh International Book Festival: Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

The Edinburgh Book Festival serves as the launch event of The Man Booker Prize-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, MaddAddam, with the audience in the Baillie Gifford Theatre on Saturday night the first to hear Atwood read from the final installment of her dystopian trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with Year of the Flood (2009).

Claire Armitstead, Books Editor for The Guardian and Observer, introduces Atwood to a second round of applause from a crowd equally comprised of younger and older adults. Atwood’s sarcasm is in top form and on display from the instant she takes the stage, drawing a few laughs as she sets up the excerpt she is about to read. Her acerbic tone is a delight to listeners and even she has to pause to chuckle before delivering the phrase, "Within a week, Bigfoot-believers from around the world have formed a posse."

MaddAddam tells the story of a global pandemic that has swept the earth and of the group of survivors, along with a gentle species called the Crakers who are bio-engineered to replace humans. The Crakers are arguably one of the novel’s most interesting elements for they are genetically modified to lack the needs that have as Atwood puts it, "gotten us [humans] into trouble." They have no need for homes or clothing, which eliminates the need for cotton-growing, manufacturing, and high street shops. They do not eat meat, they have built-in sunscreen and insect repellent, and they mate in groups.

At the time Oryx and Crake was published, Atwood insisted that the novel and the world she creates in it were not works of science fiction but rather speculative fiction, which could become reality. Atwood has a knack for releasing work that corresponds to current events and surveillance is a prevalent theme in MaddAddam. Addressing the recent NSA eavesdropping revelations, Armitstead questions Atwood about her seemingly prophetic abilities. But Atwood does not deem herself prescient: "You didn’t have the NSA scandal (at the time Oryx and Crake was written) but you did in fact have the ingredients for all of those things." She then goes on to say, "I don’t usually use things that don’t already show hints of their existence."

One of the event’s most memorable moments occurs during the question and answer segment of the evening, when a young woman asks, "Are you a feminist?" Atwood promptly turns the question back on the woman and asks her what she means by that term. "I simply want whoever is asking me that question to define the term," she says. She then asks the audience as a whole, by show of hands, how they would vote on freedoms once denied women, such as the right to shed the corset and ride a bicycle, to current liberties not all women have, such as equal pay and the right to contraception.

In true Atwood style, the 73-year-old’s keen intellect and dry wit not only keep the crowd rapt and engaged, but she also manages to get many to critically think about the social and political issues she takes to task in her work.