Claire Lowdon
‘A Meaningful Life’
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction is in a dystopian decline. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), there is plenty to object to – the mangled prose, for starters. But at least that novel holds together as a diverting though implausible ‘what-if’, in which fundamentalism and soaring infertility rates force the protagonist, Offred, to become a handmaid – a breeder – for the Republic of Gilead, formerly the USA.
Three decades on, chaos reigns in Atwoodlandia. The Heart Goes Last began as a short story called ‘I’m Starved for You’ on the website Byliner. There was demand for more, as well as ‘almost immediate interest in turning it into a television series’. So she wrote another three stories in what became the Positron series, citing 19th-century serialisation as a model. ‘That’s how Pickwick Papers got written. It was like daytime
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Catastrophe' as a category 'is too large and miscellaneous ... if there is a "correct" response to an earthquake, it is unlikely to have much in common with the "correct" response to an epidemic'.
Jonathan Sumption on Niall Ferguson's 'Doom'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/prime-minister-versus-pathogen
'He has been arrested in the past and upon his release, he has cheerfully persisted in his activism. His courage is exemplary.’
@lucyjpop investigates Zargana, the renowned Burmese satirist recently arrested as part of a widespread military crackdown.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/zargana-2
A new biography of the archaeologist and explorer Charles Masson provides a 'tale of intrigue, espionage, blackmail, disguise, rebellion, treasure and the discovery of lost civilisations', says @BijanOmrani.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-man-in-kabul