Review: In Conversation with Margaret Atwood at Brighton Dome
Now if you’ve read my review of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, you will know that I am a huge fan of her. So when I entered a competition on her Penguin mail list, thinking that I would never win tickets but it’s a free competition so I might as well enter, I was shocked when a week later, I received an email whilst waiting outside before a lecture congratulating me because I had won a pair of tickets for her Brighton date. You can imagine how ecstatic I felt! The funny thing about it is how, a few days before I won these tickets, I was telling my boyfriend how sad I was that every time Atwood does an event in the UK, the tickets have either sold out too quickly, or, like one incident, I was in Canada, where ironically she is from, whilst she was in London! Basically, I had bad luck when it came to getting tickets for her events, but now I finally had them, and I invited my friend from secondary school to accompany me as we had both studied The Handmaid’s Tale for our English A-Level together.
So, we arrived at the box office, not sure what tickets to expect as I had not been told, but they gave us fantastic seats! We were in the stalls centre, and the best part about it was how no one sat in front of us, so we had an even better view. Here’s a photo before the place filled! (please note, more people did eventually come, we were just twenty minutes early out of excitement!)
The person who interviewed Atwood was Lisa Allardice, The Guardian’s Chief Books Writer. The event started with around forty minutes of her asking her own questions to Atwood, then an interval, then the other half asking questions the audience had posed on twitter. I asked a few questions on twitter, but mine were sadly not asked.
Allardice recalled her own experience of reading The Testaments to write a review before it was released to the public, saying how she was kept in a room at Penguin in London, with two people outside. She even said how she felt like she had to ask if she could go to the toilet, just like being at school again. This presented how important it was to make sure there were no leaks of the sequel. Atwood herself spoke about the importance of this, citing how leakages could have been used to create links that you click on, which installs a virus instead and steals personal information.
Another story Atwood recalled was how she got stranded by the beast from the east and struggled to travel back to Canada, and how she actually left her laptop on the plane. We all remember the beast from the east, right? That horrible snowy weather that, because this is England and we don’t expect snow, caused everything to stop, including even school at the time for me. She was lucky enough to have it handed back to her after two hours, and another lucky thing was that The Testaments wasn’t on this laptop, but there were lots of letters in relation to it.
Now, Atwood has always said that nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale has actually been made up or not done before. She was then asked if this was the same for The Testaments, to which she replied yes. I think this really does make these books even more unnerving.
Additionally, an especially interesting point made by Atwood was how, when being asked about the happier tone of The Testaments in comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale, which obviously had a very bleak tone, she said she wanted to do this to show that regimes like these always collapse, which I think is especially powerful to present.
She also recalled how, when she was younger, she was afraid of the women on the Dutch soap advertisements in the 1940s, and how their dresses formed the inspiration for the Handmaid’s outfits. These even wore the white bonnets on their heads so there is another inspiration further shown. If you are interested in this, just search on google images for ‘Dutch soap advertisements 1940s’ and you will see exactly where this inspiration came from, and actually how a child would be scared of these!
The design of the front cover of The Testaments in terms of the colours were also spoken about by Atwood. She retold how the outfits were originally going to be blue and not green, but when she received the draft of this she didn’t like it, and she decided to colour over it in green, and made the writing orange but this wasn’t included in the final published version. The bright colour stands out, and that is obviously what Atwood intended, perhaps to evoke how this is more of a positive book than the bleakness of the dark red of The Handmaid’s Tale. She even said how the book producers ran out of this green ink for two weeks!
Now, for those Atwood fans wondering what is happening next, Atwood has said she will be publishing a poetry collection next year, so that’s great news, right? The interviewer said to her how, normally when you publish a poetry collection, a huge book follows afterwards, to which Atwood laughed and said, look I’m turning eighty soon, so basically what she was saying was don’t hold your breath, or just at least expect her to have a break!
Overall, I absolutely loved Atwood’s humorous tones, as well as how, if she didn’t want to answer a question, she’d say it or would be straight to the point. I am very much looking forward to a poetry collection next year!