If someone had told me a few weeks ago that nearly every major news website and social media account in the English-speaking world would post a video of Margaret Atwood – the 82-year-old matron saint of Canadian letters, the subject of countless doctoral dissertations and at least ten forests worth of undergraduate student essays – firing a flamethrower at a specially made, unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, I probably would have been a bit sceptical.
Then again, in her public appearances, Atwood has always managed to combine an elegant self-possession with an unflinching, even rugged pertinacity. In every interview I have read or seen, she seems simultaneously demure and terrifying, like a diminutive grandmother – who also just happens to be holding a flamethrower.
