Margaret Atwood: ‘I was there first’ in predicting Brexit tensions

Telegraph Reporters
Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is published today
Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is published today

Margaret Atwood has warned that the world is becoming closer to Gilead, the totalitarian state in her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

“Instead of fantasy – ‘ha ha, this will never happen’ – it’s got a lot closer to reality,” the Canadian author told Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. “Because of a lot of people backing Donald Trump – that would be the religious right – and because of his generally unhelpful attitudes towards women.”

Atwood, 79, said she was concerned for young women “in certain states in the United States, [where] they see the freedom to choose legislation being all but overturned”. She added: “Do you want to live in a society in which the state has control over your entire life and your body?”

Asked whether the political climate in Britain since the Brexit vote had “fed into” her thinking while writing her Booker Prize-shortlisted Handsmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments, published today, Atwood said: “My thinking fed into it – I was there first!”

She continued: “When things are going well, people get more tolerant as a rule. When things aren’t going well, they get more defensive as a rule. When people feel squeezed, there is always a tendency to feel other people somewhere else are controlling everything, and we have to wrench control back.”

Reviewing the novel for the Sunday Telegraph, Allison Pearson wrote that recent events had lent an “extra piquancy” to Atwood’s pessimistic vision of the future.

The success of a TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale raised expectations for Atwood’s follow-up to the 1985 novel, the contents of which were a closely guarded secret until copies were accidentally posted out early by Amazon last week.

Before the book’s release, Atwood and her publisher were targeted by "cyber criminals", attempting to steal the novel using fake emails in a “phishing” scam, the novelist revealed yesterday.”Really, they were trying to steal it and we had to use a lot of code words and passwords,” she told the BBC.