How science has influenced the life, world view and work of Margaret Atwood

When I meet Margaret Atwood, she’s bundled up for what used to be a typical Toronto winter but is now a frigid outlier thanks to global warming.

The step back into climates past feels appropriate. I’m hoping we can dive into Atwood’s personal history as chronicled in her recent autobiography, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. Specifically I want to explore how science has influenced the life and world view of Canada’s most celebrated author.

“So birds, bugs and neurons,” says Atwood, summarizing our mission.

This is an unusual assignment for me. As The Globe and Mail’s science reporter, my list of sources is long on researchers but short on literary icons.

Nevertheless, with Atwood I know there’s plenty to discuss. In her universe, science is not separate from the humanities. It’s part of the package.

I opt to start with neurons.

As Atwood reminds me, these reside in the professional realm of her older brother Harold, a neurophysiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

In Book of Lives, neurons make an appearance when Harold drops in at Atwood’s Cambridge, Mass., apartment while on a trip to Harvard University. It’s the mid-1960s and she is there working on a PhD in Victorian literature (via Radcliffe College, since Harvard was not yet officially granting degrees to women when Atwood first arrived there).

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Her brother’s early research was focused on the neuromuscular system of crabs. As Atwood explains, in the days before electron microscopes were widely available, the oversized neurons of crabs (relative to their human counterparts) made for ideal study subjects.

To celebrate Harold’s visit, Atwood bakes a cake decorated with neurons done in chocolate icing. But I know Atwood’s fascination with the subject goes beyond the icing on the cake, as it were. With this in mind I turn the conversation to a piece in Atwood’s 2022 collection of essays, Burning Questions.

It’s there she makes the case for storytelling as part of humanity’s evolutionary legacy. Some scientists have argued that the neural wiring that allowed our hunter-gathering ancestors to track animals and reconstruct their movements across the landscape is the same cognitive hardware that makes us natural-born storytellers.

As Atwood writes, the cues that humans pick up from their environment can be mentally organized “as a series of events and actions centring around a cast of characters.” From there, it’s a short step to the first proto-Shakespeare.

At other times Atwood has called attention to the doubled-edged nature of Darwin’s gift. This is because people tell stories not just to explain where the next meal is coming from or share tips about where danger lies. Stories are also for deceiving competitors and camouflaging our intentions. Long before fake news became part of our cultural vernacular it was coiled into our DNA, as tricky and essential as a leopard’s spots.

But wait, I ask, if we’ve evolved the ability to fool each other with our stories why do we lack an equally strong defence to detect when we’re being sold a bill of goods?

“Let’s make a distinction between knowledge and belief,” Atwood says. “Knowledge is provable, and if it’s a science thing it rests on experiments with results that you should be able to repeat.”

What trips us up, she says is our longing to believe, especially in things that conform to our understanding of the world.

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This sociobiological view of storytelling reminds me of the late E.O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist and author whose tenure at Harvard was already well under way when Atwood was working on her graduate studies (which she later abandoned in favour of her writing career).

Atwood tells me how she later came to review Wilson’s only novel, Anthill, in 2010: The New York Review of Books had decided she was the best qualified person to do so.

“I knew about the science,” she says. “The central part of it is the rise and fall of an ant colony, and it’s terrific – the ant part is terrific. The human part, not so much.”

That brings me to an interview I had with Wilson, when I asked him how to ensure that children growing up in our online era retain a love of nature – what Wilson calls “biophilia.”

“Children should be allowed to disturb nature a little bit,” Wilson told me. The point is to let kids interact with the natural world, rather than keep it at arm’s length like a museum diorama.

That squares with Atwood’s own upbringing. The Ottawa-born daughter of a government entomologist, she spent her early summers in a remote cabin in northwestern Quebec, as required by her father’s field work.

For Atwood and her siblings, the setting was tailor-made for interactions with nature, augmented by the presence of science-minded adults including her father, Carl Atwood, and various colleagues. Life, in all its variety – including fish, frogs, snakes, worms and other “dwellers in damp and shadowy places” – was everywhere, she writes, reinforcing the notion that humans are just one component of an endlessly diverse biological community.

But equally apparent were the risks the wilderness presents to the unwary, especially in a Canadian context where it’s not difficult or unusual for people to disappear in the wild. It’s a theme that emerges throughout Atwood’s fiction, such as in the short story Death by Landscape, originally published in 1989.

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Atwood’s early immersion in the natural world continued after her father was offered a faculty position at the University of Toronto and family summers were spend at Pointe Des Chênes on Lake Superior. For Carl, the location allowed quick access to Sault Ste. Marie, where a forest insect laboratory is based.

Of Carl, Atwood writes in Book of Lives, “Our father never met a young child he wasn’t prepared to indulge, by playing a game, answering a question about the natural world, or teaching a practical skill, such as fire-lighting or the proper use of an edged tool.”

His impact on Atwood went beyond a philosophical affinity for the wilderness. As a high-school student, her exam marks in biology were higher than in English. Quoting Robert Frost, Atwood tells me her future seemed to point to science until “two roads diverged in the yellow wood.”

“I took the most lunatic road in being a writer,” she said, “Other than that I would have made a very good botanist, as my father was fond of saying.”

The end of Book of Lives includes an essay written by Carl, On Becoming an Entomologist, found among his papers after he died in 1993.

Born in 1906 and raised in rural Nova Scotia, he vividly describes the experience of spotting a large green caterpillar crossing a gravel road as a child, which he carefully brought home and cared for by feeding birch leaves. In time, it spun a cocoon, which he identified as that of a cecropia moth.

“This was the real beginning of my lifelong interest in insects,” Carl wrote.

Ripples from that moment of awakening continue to reverberate more than a century later. Since 2008, the University of Toronto has hosted the Atwood Colloquium in Ecology and Evolution in honour of Carl’s life and work with guest speakers selected by graduate students.

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Atwood sometimes attends these talks, which can be memorable. For example, in 2023 the speaker was Kevin Lafferty, a specialist in fish parasites at the University of California Santa Barbara.

“He wowed everybody by showing a video of himself with a fish parasite that was about this big – which he fried and ate,” Atwood said, using her thumb to indicate the size of the creature, a stomach worm.

Lafferty, who arrived at the talk in a rush after a series of cancelled flights, said he fixated on Atwood in the audience.

“She had a kind and attentive look on her face that made me relax and I think helped the audience have fun with the talk,” he said.

Atwood has also spoken at the colloquium about what it was like to grow up around a working scientist in the field.

I am curious if Atwood inherited any of her father’s entomological inclinations and transposed them into her writing. I ask if she regards her characters as specimens, driven to their actions in ways that can be rationalized with scientific detachment.

Here I am thinking of Joseph Conrad’s Stein, a wealthy merchant and amateur entomologist whom readers meet part way through Lord Jim, showing off a prize butterfly. It is a device that allows Conrad to examine human nature and its imperfections from a distance.

Atwood firmly rejects the comparison.

“In order to be a novelist you have to be empathetic to your characters,” she says. “The people pinning the butterflies to the board are not particularly empathetic.”

A digression follows around the theme of mad doctors, from Frankenstein onward. It culminates in Atwood describing to me the plot of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a 1962 B-movie in which a scientist preserves the still-conscious head of his fiancé, which was severed in a car accident, and aims to reattach it to the body of an unwitting burlesque dancer. Aided by telepathic powers and a monster created in an experiment gone wrong, the head manages to thwart the plan. The story ends with the monster carrying the dancer to safety as the laboratory goes up in flames. Before it is consumed in fire, the head declares, “I told you to let me die!”

I feel I’m glimpsing a bit of the culture loam from which Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, with its pigoons, rakunks and other genetic concoctions would eventually spring. That novel, and the MaddAddam trilogy to which it belongs, is the most obvious example of science fiction elements in Atwood work.

To me, however, the novel that best illustrates Atwood’s scientific instinct is Alias Grace, a work of historical fiction based on a notorious murder case in 1840s Upper Canada. The research for the novel was prodigious, as there were plenty of conflicting accounts from the time to sort through.

In the end, Atwood committed to telling a story that was consistent with all of the historical evidence without arbitrarily discounting possibilities. In essence, it was doing what a scientist does when carefully considering multiple working hypotheses based on incomplete data. But it meant leaving readers to answer for themselves the question of whether the story’s protagonist, Grace Marks, committed murder.

Atwood says that Sarah Polley, who wrote and produced the miniseries based on the novel “tried to get it out of me” about whether she thought Marks was guilty. Atwood told her she didn’t know.

But why not simply pick a version, as fictionalized accounts so often do?

“Let me put it this way,” Atwood said. “Speaking as a novelist, it wouldn’t have been interesting to write it if I had known the result.”

We’re running out of time and I have yet ask about birds.

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The question takes us to western Lake Erie. Avid birders, Atwood and her partner, the late Graeme Gibson, had been visiting Point Pelee to catch the spring migration since the 1970s. They later discovered that the more secluded Pelee Island was even more appealing and purchased a summer house there in 1987. It proved a good place for bird and for words, starting with Cat’s Eye, a novel that Atwood partly wrote on the island.

Atwood is an enthusiastic promoter and supporter of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, a conservation and public education facility established in 2004.

It seems to me a hopeful act for a writer known for works that project an approaching environmental apocalypse.

But Atwood corrects this impression, not with cynicism but certainty that she already knows the ending to the larger story humanity has been writing since we began wandering the African savannah.

It’s a simple one to write, she tells me: “Nature wins.”