The Handmaid’s Tale author says ‘people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism’

Margaret Atwood, who has created dystopias from Gilead to the collapsed civilisation of Oryx and Crake, has spoken: our locked-down world might be “an unpleasant, frightening, disagreeable place you don’t want to be”, but it is not dystopian.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Emma Barnett, Atwood said that “a dystopia, technically, is an arranged unpleasant society that you don’t want to be living in. This one was not arranged. So people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism. It’s not a deliberate arrangement.”

What it is, said Atwood, is “an emergency crisis”. “Being in an unpleasant situation such as the blitz, that’s not a dystopia. It’s an unpleasant, frightening, disagreeable place you don’t want to be, but it wasn’t arranged by a government that is in control of you,” said the author of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood compared the conspiracy theories about 5G spreading the coronavirus to reactions when the plague hit Europe in the 14th century.

“When there’s an epidemic of panic, people long for something to blame, because if you can find the thing to blame, you can eliminate the threat,” she said. “So during the Black Death the following people got blamed pretty much in this order: lepers, as they went from town to town; Gypsies, because they travelled around; Jews, for all of the usual reasons. And witches, you know about those witches? Just causing plagues all over the place. So if you could if you could destroy all those people then maybe you wouldn’t have the plague. I guess the impulse is always to burn something.”

The conspiracies around 5G have led to phone masts being attacked and burned. “At least they’re not burning people yet,” said the two-time Booker prize winner.

Atwood also criticised how politicians have been using warlike language to describe their approach to the pandemic.

“I mean lucky old you if you’ve got a good immune system and probably nice medical care. But because somebody doesn’t come through, doesn’t mean they weren’t a fighter. It’s a ‘blame the victim’ kind of thing – they didn’t fight hard. So I don’t use that kind of language about it. It’s not a war.”

She predicted that the crisis would lead to the world valuing health workers and universal healthcare a lot more. “You can see the kind of chaos that’s going on south of the border,” said the Canadian author. “Some states just aren’t getting support, and they don’t have plans and things are really quite difficult there. Let us also not forget we’ve had these alarms before, we even had plans for dealing with pandemics. And then when there wasn’t a pandemic, they got put on the shelf and and a lot of countries just were not ready for this, which they could have been had they remembered.”

Atwood, whose partner Graeme Gibson died in September, said that life has been “difficult, ever since September, but I’ve had some practice being alone. And, yes it’s difficult, but I’m not alone on the planet.”

On Wednesday, it was announced that Atwood was putting on an “isolation puppet show” of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, with her sister, Ruth, for the BBC’s Front Row Late on Thursday night.

Classicist Mary Beard, who is presenting the show, said the puppets were constructed of “things they happened to have around the house”, including a starring role for some hand sanitiser. “It’s as funny and engaging as it sounds,” she said.