Timing is all. In 1969 Margaret Atwood’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 free-market 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.’
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