crystallize!

Payback, by Margaret Atwood

I’ve long admired Margaret Atwood’s writing, but this was my first foray into her nonfiction. The chapters of this book were first presented as a series of lectures on CBC radio in November 2008, so although they are of a decidedly literary-scholar bent, they also spin together an engaging series of stories, much as you might expect from Atwood as professional storyteller.

From this book I learned many interesting things, including:

• Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees have a very clear sense of what constitutes fairness.
• In Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), the word for “debt” is the same as the word for “sin” — hence, among other things, the disparate versions of “forgive us our trespasses.”
• How Dickens’s A Christmas Carol can be read as a direct reversal of Marlowe’s (or Gounod’s) Faust.
• Why mills and millers carry a stigma in folklore.

I enjoyed this tour through religious, literary, and social history, and its insightful exploration of how humans have thought about debt from ancient times until today. Don’t miss the final chapter’s reworking of Scrooge into a contemporary setting, featuring Scrooge Nouveau and his alternate possible futures involving hemp suits and a giant cockroach.