Margaret Atwood: ‘I wouldn’t want to live forever’

The author’s dystopian thriller series has inspired a new visionary ballet by choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor and composer Max Richter

In 2001, on a visit to Australia, Margaret Atwood was staying at Cassowary House in Cairns, in the tropical rainforests of North Queensland, a lodging catering specially to birdwatchers, of which Atwood is one. A cassowary is a flightless bird – “there aren’t many left,” says Atwood. “When birdwatchers get together, the talk inevitably turns to extinction.”
Atwood began pondering the question of where we have gone wrong as human beings and, as she puts it, “what kind of characteristics would we need to remove from ourselves in order not to require the kinds of infrastructures that have been wrecking the world.”
And so a book was born.
In her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood describes a dystopian near-future in which the environment has been devastated by man’s carelessness and greed. Society is divided between a technocratic elite and a disenfranchised, unruly proletariat; government has more or less vanished and control is in the hands of a private security corporation, CorpSeCorps.
A society, in short, ripe for extinction. The deus ex machina arrives in the form of a misguided technological genius, Crake, who manufactures a pandemic designed to wipe out humanity, replacing it with a bio-engineered human variant, the Crakers, who will return the world to a sort of prelapsarian innocence.
The Crakers are peaceful herbivores. “They don’t need agriculture – they just eat leaves – so they don’t have territorial wars,” explains Atwood. “They don’t need clothes, which means they don’t need a fashion industry. Sorry about that. They don’t need wool or plastic.”
Like most mammals, they mate only in season, the males waving outsized blue penises. “They’re not exclusive in their mating habits, which means they will never write Romeo and Juliet or strangle their rivals or have sexual jealousy. To make things even better, I gave them built-in sunblock and built-in insect repellent.” Atwood laughs. “Which I’d also like to have.”
Oryx and Crake was published in 2003 – “a fairly quick write,” she says, “which sometimes books are not” – the first in a trilogy, followed by The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013).
Now comes MaddAddam, a visionary ballet inspired by the three books, created and directed by Sir Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, and newly ennobled in the last honours list in June, with music by his long-time collaborator Max Richter.
Atwood is speaking via Zoom, in a book-lined room in her home in Toronto, elegant and amused. In another corner of the screen, McGregor is speaking from his home in London – a beaming smile, bubbling with enthusiasm, looking, as Atwood notes, “very chipper”. 
“I didn’t know you were Sir Wayne, when did that happen?” Atwood’s eyes twinkle with mischief, her humour not so much dry as parched. “Are you going to get a robe, a coronet?”
The idea for the ballet came from a meeting between McGregor and Atwood in Toronto in 2017. McGregor, a long-time fan of the novelist’s work, who was reading The Blind Assassin at the time, told her he wanted to make a ballet created from one of her books, but was unsure which one. When Atwood suggested MaddAddam, he leapt at the opportunity. “I just loved the subversion in the book, and Margaret was very much up for that as you can imagine,” McGregor says.
“The writing is so vivid and visceral with such incredible contexts and themes it just felt that it was so rich for ballet and so unusual. There are no ballets like that in any of the repertories around the world.”
Atwood laughs. “You can say that again.” She played no part in the development of the piece. “But then I’m not a choreographer. What do I know?” she says. “Nothing. And Wayne wouldn’t let anybody in.”
Now it’s McGregor’s turn to laugh: “That is so not true.”
“It is true,” Atwood insists. “He didn’t want to disrupt the concentration of the dancers, which is quite right. So I had no idea of what he was going to do. But really I wanted to know what he would do about the great big blue penises. I said, “How are you going to handle that?” And he said, “We’ll come up with something.”
MaddAddam was originally planned for 2020 and was delayed by Covid – ironic given that the subject of the piece is a pandemic. “I think Margaret cast some sort of spell,” McGregor jokes. “I didn’t do it,” she replies.
“I didn’t elect Donald Trump either. So don’t blame it on me.” The ballet was eventually staged in Toronto by the National Ballet of Canada in 2022.
“Anything made out of my work is either going to be a raving success or a complete disaster – there’s no middle ground,” Atwood says. But MaddAddam was “a smash hit”. 
“You see people with green hair and nose rings in the audience,” she adds, “you know you’ve reached a whole new generation.”
MaddAddam is the third literary work that McGregor has adapted for ballet, following Woolf Works, inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf, staged by the Royal Ballet in 2017, and 2021’s The Dante Project, inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy. His admiration and respect for Atwood are clearly boundless. While left to his own devices, McGregor says he felt he had Atwood “on my shoulder” throughout the making of the piece, and was “very relieved” when she declared herself pleased with the result.
“I bet you were,” Atwood says. “I think it was easier to have me on your shoulder than either Woolf or Dante, who were both rather critical people. You knew at least that I wasn’t going to consign you to hell.”
MaddAddam is less a narrative telling of the story than an evocation of its central themes and characters, through dance, music and multimedia projections of a kind that McGregor has worked with in the past. (Among his numerous accomplishments is choreographing the AI-generated images in Abba Voyage.)
“We’re lucky in a way that dance doesn’t do concreteness very well,” he says. “It’s better in slipperiness, ambiguity and multiple meanings and sensation. One of the things I always take from reading amazing literature is the feeling of the novel and how it sits in my body.
“Responding so viscerally to Margaret’s writing, it’s a pleasure to convert that into the language of movement and find a visual equivalent or an acoustic equivalent, because her writing is so vivid acoustically you already get a sense of what the sounds are in that world,” he adds. “So you’re working visually and musically and kinetically to create a kind of collage, an impressionistic aspect to the novels.
“The concrete meaning isn’t necessarily the thing [in the ballet],” he continues. “If you’ve read the novels, you can see your way through the work in that particular way. Or if you’ve never read the novels, you get the sense of some of the key themes and pathways, and hopefully it encourages you to go and read the novels because they are fantastic.”
McGregor has collaborated with Richter, who has written the score for MaddAddam, on a number of projects over the years – most recently Woolf Works. “I always like to have a Max project on the go,” he says. Richter’s emotionally haunting music, from the orchestral to electronica and rock, has made him one of the most celebrated and in-demand of all modern composers. He describes his collaboration with McGregor as “a sort of organic connecting process”, merging dance, music and projection in “an all-consuming, 360-degree immersive object.
“We have the pre-imagined universe that Margaret has created and which Wayne and I both responded to in a similar kind of way,” says Richter. “Each of the novels has two or three key events and a handful of key characters that we need to address musically and in terms of the storytelling. But at the same time, certainly for me, it was a matter of responding to the images that Margaret conjures and the emotional texture of the books, which music is very good for exploring.”
Working alone, he begins by developing a “musical language” or structure for the piece, then looks at film from the rehearsal room where McGregor is working with the dancers. “It may be quite different but we’ll try to connect things, and when things fit together you’ll get these wonderful multiplying effects,” he says. “A positive feedback loop starts to happen in those conversations, and you hope that the material takes on a life of its own.”
Like perhaps her best-known work, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood describes the MaddAddam trilogy as speculative fiction. There is nothing in the books, she says, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, that did not have its root in existing technological developments, and “its corresponding clipping in the ominous brown research box” that she keeps in her cellar. Although, she does admit to “cranking a few things up a bit”.
The glowing rabbits that first appear in Oryx and Crake were inspired by a news report about Alba, a genetically modified rabbit created in 2000 by the artist Eduardo Kac in collaboration with a French geneticist, using a protein found in jellyfish that fluoresces green when exposed to blue light.
And while we do not yet have the book’s “liobams” (a lab-made cross between a lion and a lamb), “pigoons” (pigs that have been genetically modified as part of “Operation Immortality” to grow human organs for transplant are no longer the stuff of fiction. The American biotech company Revivicor Inc is at present working on a project to clone farm animals to provide hearts, livers and other organs for human transplant.
“The books were based on an informed probability of such things happening. But not an inevitability,” Atwood says. “There are several pathways – choose door A and you’re going to get this, choose door B and you’re going to get that. It’s a sort of make-your-own adventure. We’re all involved in a multiple-choice experiment involving us.”
Atwood herself has no truck with the idea, much beloved and explored by Silicon Valley, of a quest for immortality. “I think it’s silly. I wouldn’t want to live for ever,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to live for ever either,” McGregor chips in.
“What is for ever anyway?” Atwood asks. Stories about those in search of immortality are as old as mankind itself, she points out, “and none of them are very happy people.”
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian tale dating back to the 2nd millennium BC, there is a character who has discovered a plant that contains the secret of immortality. “Gilgamesh wants it,” Atwood says. “He’s going to take it back to his own civilisation, but unfortunately he drops it down a well.” She pauses. “That’s why we’re not immortal, in case you wondered,” she adds, drily. 
In MaddAddam, she makes amusing play of the idea of cryogenics, with a company called CryoJeenyus, which studiously avoids the word “death” in favour of “life-suspending event”.
“Well, come on,” says Atwood. “You’ve got refrigerators, and you’ve also got relatives who are very annoyed they’re not inheriting because the person whose money they would have inherited is neither alive nor dead. So what would be the temptation to just go and cut the power supply?”
Atwood once described Oryx and Crake as a “fun-filled, joke-packed rollicking adventure novel about the downfall of the human race”. And true to form, the trilogy is leavened with Atwood’s acerbic wit, while at the same time posing serious questions about the perils of tampering with nature, the idea of the perfectibility of man, and the dangers of utopianism.
“People interpret Crake as this awful monster who’s destroying everybody because he’s crazy,” she says. “But what is he really doing? In his own mind, he’s making a better kind of human being, the Crakers, which raises the question, how much of ourselves can we subtract or change while remaining human?
“He’s certainly a benefactor to the planet, since these new kinds of people do not destroy the planet in the way we have been doing. For one thing, they’re vegetarians – so the fish, birds and animals are very happy with them.”
But surely it’s a dangerous utopianism? “All utopianism is dangerous,” comes the reply. “The Victorians really believed in utopias; they believed humans were perfectible and could be vastly improved. There were lots of utopias, and they all involved women wearing less clothing, strangely enough.” She laughs. “None of them were very practical.”
Utopianism is a subject that greatly interests Atwood. She recently hosted an online eight-week programme, Practical Utopias, with the aim, as the prospectus puts it, of tackling some of humanity’s most pressing challenges and posing the question, “Can we do better than past utopias?”
“Practical Utopias was “let’s see what we can do to solve the same problems human beings have always had”, which are where are you going to live, what are you going to eat, are you going to have to wear anything, where’s your fresh water coming from, what form of commerce are you going to have – if any? And the thing that everybody dodges – what are you going to do with the people who don’t agree with you, or criminals? Nobody’s going to think about that because their utopia is going to be so great that who would want to do bad things?”
That’s one of the reasons, explains McGregor, that he “wanted to work with Margaret. She has these provocations throughout the novel all the time,” he says. “She’s making us think, making us respond and really feel. And that’s one of the powers of dance as well. It is not just entertainment. Dance encourages you to have an embodied life – it’s the body thinking with and through itself, a form of physical thinking. And it’s really important to have a holistic sense of oneself in that way.”
While the tenor of MaddAddam is dystopian, out of the ashes comes the prospect of renewal and the survival of humanity; albeit humanity of a very different sort. 
“It’s a very sophisticated piece of storytelling on so many levels,” says Richter. “It’s very varied in its colours, and it has a lot of darkness in it, as Margaret’s writing often does. But I remember when I first read it, thinking the ending is very complex morally, but I read it as hopeful. But in order to achieve that hope you have to let go of everything you thought was meaningful. It has an amazingly wide moral and emotional bandwidth.”
For Atwood, the only recourse is hope – “otherwise you wouldn’t get up in the morning” – and nothing she writes is intended to sound a warning. “If I wanted to do that I’d just rent a bulletin board: “War is hell”.
“I think what you’re doing with a reader, and in any art form, is that the audience is not passive, it’s a participant in what you’re doing, and very much so with reading a novel. What you are doing is taking readers on a journey, being Virgil to the reader’s Dante. Virgil has been to hell before and can show you the way, and various things that may or may not be edifying to you, and you’re going to hear a lot of stories.
“It’s said at one point that hell is where nobody forgets anything and heaven is where memory vanishes – that’s what it is to Dante,” she continues. “So you’re going to hear all of these things. But Virgil is going to get you out again. He’s not just going to leave you there.”
Atwood smiles. “We may be on the way to hell in a handbasket. But we still have time, and we’ve got a second chance.”
MaddAddam will be at the Royal Ballet and Opera, London WC2, 14-30 November (rbo.org.uk)