NINETEEN NINETY WAS supposed to be the first year of a brand-new era. The Soviet Union was changed utterly. Germany was reunifying, a thing we thought we’d never witness in this lifetime. The West and that body of practices and values attached to something called “capitalism” or “the free-market economy” seemed triumphant. It was not yet foreseen that, with the disappearance of its enemy, the Western moral balloon would lose helium: it’s great to champion freedom in the absence of it, but hard to feel hand-on-heart noble about shopping malls and parking lots and the right to kill yourself through overeating.
We approached the last decade before that artificial times-change hinge, The Millennium, in a strange state of disorientation. But, as the Italian writer Roberto Calasso has pointed out, heroes have a need for monsters, though monsters can do very well without heroes; and the monster-producing energies were gathering themselves together throughout the decade.
Things were quieter on the writing front, mine at least. In 1991 I published Wilderness Tips, a collection of stories written during the late 1980s. In the same year we went to France in search of writing time. We could not rent one house for the whole period, so we rented three successive houses — one for fall, one for winter, one for spring — in and around the town of Lourmarin, in Provence. It was in these three houses that I began writing my novel The Robber Bride, the occasion for the essay in this volume called “Spotty-Handed Villainesses.” I also put together a selection of very short fiction called Good Bones, a companion to the 1983 Murder in the Dark. It was published in 1992, with a cover design I’d pasted together out of issues of French Vogue magazine. (Both books were done for a small press, and author collage saves money.)
We returned to Canada in time for the summer of 1992. I completed The Robber Bride in January of 1993, on a train going across Canada. My father had died earlier that month, right after I myself had been seriously ill with scarlet fever, and it was an effort of will to finish.
A book of poetry, Morning in the Burned House, came out in 1995. Also in that year I published a series of four lectures I’d given at Oxford University on the subject of Canadian literature and the North. The title was Strange Things, after the first words in the Robert Service poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” That poem goes on to talk about the men who moil for gold, and it was a moiling sort of decade.
I began the novel Alias Grace while I was on a book tour in Europe — in Switzerland, a suitably Freudian/Jungian locale. The process is described in the essay, “In Search of Alias Grace.” What I didn’t put in is that right after finishing the book we went to a small village in western Ireland, and I had to edit the book by FedEx — I did not yet have e-mail — which meant that I had to hang a tea towel on the hedge so the deliveryman would know where we were.
I wrote The Blind Assassin after several false starts, one of them in Canada, one of them in a curious rented-by-Internet flat in London. The breakthrough came, again, in France, where I was writing on the assemblage of end tables that served as a desk. I finished it in 1999, and did the editing partly in Madrid, where I was also finishing the six lectures I gave at Cambridge University that year, on the subject of writers and writing, which were published as Negotiating with the Dead. So during the early months of that year, it was bright blue skies and sunlight and the eating of churros, and then in the spring it was the wonderful Cambridge gardens, and bluebells in the woods, and mist.
The Blind Assassin came out in the fall. It became the fourth of my books to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and I had to put together another black outfit. To my surprise, the book committed what Oscar Wilde would have called an unpardonable solecism of style by actually winning. Many Canadians were pleased by this. Some weren’t.
To backtrack: on New Year’s Eve 2000, the millennium was ushered in. Our computers were all supposed to go into meltdown, but they didn’t. My mother was by this time very old and nearly blind, but she could still see bright lights. We arranged some fireworks outside her picture window so she could participate, and my sister accidentally set fire to the backyard. That’s my image of the grand event — my sister jumping up and down in the dry weeds, attempting to stamp out the conflagration.
On my journal page that began the year 2000, I scribbled: The fireworks were very good on TV except for the fatuous commentary. Nothing leaked. The church bells rang. It was quite warm. There was a half moon, The angels did not arrive, or at least none visible to the naked eye. No bombs fell. No snow. No terrorists around here.
Famous last words.