The Next Creation Story, Perhaps
I discovered Margaret Atwood not long after she’d won the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin (2000), got hooked, and began reading her backwards: Alias Grace (1996), The Robber Bride (1993), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), all the way back to The Edible Woman (1969). I sense a shift with The Handmaid’s Tale, into what some might call her literary maturity, coinciding with her middle age. After the shift, she began pushing her literary boundaries. Each subsequent novel is different. Each is engaged with a bigger picture: where we came from, what we’re doing now, where we might be heading, what might happen if we’re not careful, and, with MaddAddam (2013), what might happen after that. She keeps going. She’s unpredictable.
There are always surprises. In The Blind Assassin, for example, the elder protagonist Iris—the muscle controlling the eye; the messenger of the gods—chose “between classicism and romanticism” in her youth, preferring “to be…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins