The devil’s work
Andro Linklater
PAYBACK: DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH by Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 230, ISBN 9780747598497 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Timing is all. In 1969 Margaret A t w o o d ’ s An Edible Woman was published, and its iconic portrayal of women moulded into objects for male consumption caught the crest of the feminist wave and surfed into the shelves of required reading. Almost four decades on, Payback, her meditation on the nature of debt, appears just as the world is freefalling into an economic trough. Has she given voice to the zeitgeist again? If so, we are entering a world of stern reciprocity — as you sow so shall you reap — in place of the pickpocket exuberance of freemarket economics.
The debt on Atwood’s mind is always double-headed. One person’s debt is another’s credit, and that connection between two people necessarily implies that the financial arrangement must be a moral relationship as well. ‘But the truth is’, said Samuel Johnson, railing against the 18th-century equivalent of subprime mortgages, ‘that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust.’ Consequently, the author’s meditation takes her back to the origins of social morality, the desire for fairness. To illustrate that a sense of equity is innate, she cites a nice experiment in which a group of monkeys, trained to exchange pebbles for thin slices of cucumber, went into a deep sulk when one of their number was unfairly rewarded with juicy grapes. From there, by way of the retributive justice of the Furies that cancelled a blood debt in Greek drama, Atwood moves on to the Janusheaded creation of Charles Kingsley, kindly Mrs DoAsYouWouldBeDoneBy and harsh Mrs BeDoneByAsYouDid, who taught the rules of personal obligation, and arrives at the book’s most successful section, a long essay on Ebenezer Scrooge, where she can get to grips with both the devil and capitalism. ‘Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping,
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