Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” #MARM2024

The title of this story reminded me of both “The Last Interview” series and the Proust Questionnaire—as it has been broadcast in CBC’s “The Next Chapter” with the interview questions posed to contemporary authors in an otherworldly, beyond-the-grave-ish questioning tone.

It strikes me as a piece that would have been quite fun to write, if one had read a lot of—and a lot about—George Orwell. It was originally published in INQUE Magazine, which looks amazing, though well beyond my budget.

It’s also fun for readers; the interview format brings out a different cadence and displays an exchange, which makes us feel more like we’re witnessing a tennis match, the backs of our heels banging the bleachers.

Along the way, we also learn a few details about Margaret Atwood (like, the first of his books she read was Animal Farm, when she was eight or nine years old, and she thought the characters were actually animals—so one of their deaths left her devastated).

It strikes me as curious that the mode of communication is old-fashioned: Mrs Verity is the medium. Given her early adoption of various technologies, I would have guessed that a premise like this in Atwood’s hands would have involved some sort of specialised gadget or digital interfere but, nope, Mrs Verity. You can practically smell the lavender water and dust.

From Orwell’s perspective, there’s discussion of various forms of governance, dynamics in his personal relationships whether familial or marital, specific books written and how the public received the ideas therein (in his lifetime), a lot of coughing and throat-clearing, the sound of matches being struck, and the risks and benefits of his career.

From the interviewer’s perspective, there’s a lot of observations about how things have and haven’t changed. There’s more than a dash of the fangirl, which offsets the suspicion that this could be a very elevated conversation about philosophy, about big ideas like war and beauty.

MARM 2024 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 18)
Margaret Atwood’s 85^th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

The very nature of the piece and the gap that exists between some of the questions and answers provokes a set of serious questions that lurk beneath the entertaining elements.

For instance: what do we look for, when we look at works that are now said to have been prescient.

That’s a real snarl of verb tenses, and I think that, also, reveals just how complicated this practice is. Because of course we, in the present-day, in difficult times, ‘want answers’ and ‘crave solutions’ and we tend to look for them in books when we are bookish people.

But this is complicated when the original writer has not witnessed the present-day situation for themselves. And it’s also complicated by the fact that we tend to misunderstand other people as often—maybe more often—as we understand them. We casually use terms that we consider basic because we assume that everyone else uses them just like us.

With writers as prominent as Orwell, many scholars and readers have spent so much time with his work that they believe they understand him perfectly—but they’re not all in agreement either. Let alone those of us who read one of his books in school, or those of us who haven’t read him at all, but have only read other readers’ thoughts about him and have not formed our own responses.

For me, the piece is not only an interrogation of George Orwell, but an interrogation of how we engage with other people and ideas, past and present. It invites us to consider how we invest in the process of questioning and conversating and listening, outwardly and inwardly, and how we consume, actively or passively. (How significant is it, for instance, that this piece opens with Orwell dismissing women writers entirely?)

I found the final exchange almost gimmicky when I first read it, but when I returned to it a few days later, I found it unexpectedly moving. I won’t share the details, only the structure because the idea that their conversation must end isn’t a spoiler.

In short, a communication difficulty resides in Mrs Verity herself. The interviewer has just started to speak of hope, when Orwell says that he might have to leave because Mrs Verity is waking up. She can no longer serve as the conduit because she is coming out of her trance. (How significant is the literal ‘medium’ in this story: phew, I hadn’t even thought of the significance of the term ‘medium’.)

The interviewer hastens to speak of how the rose bushes that Orwell planted are still alive and still blooming and how she sees this as symbolic, but it’s too late, because the connection has been broken. “Hello? Hello? Oh, come back! Please, just a little longer…”

It speaks to a deep longing for an authority to whom we could turn in times of trouble. (But we, ourselves, must act.) It speaks to a fluctuation between the need for a threat that incentivizes change and the need for hope. (But each of us must balance for ourselves.) It speaks to the disorderly way we blurt out our thoughts and feelings without realizing that each statement could be our last. (But that is always true, not only in difficult times.)

And, then, there is no more time to speak.

Did this story speak to you?
Did you know about INQUE magazine?
What’s your experience with Orwell?
What other author would you like to see interrogated in this manner?