LAST HALLOWEEN, THERE WAS A cele­bratory lunch for Margaret Atwood at Massey College. The former camp counsellor who used to go to the Hadassah bazaar every year to scavenge costumes for her campers rose to the occasion. She was all in black, except for orange collar and cuffs, and a pair of vast monarch butterfly wings, orange veined with black.

Assembled at round tables in the college’s upper library were about 50 people, including Ursula Franklin, Thomas King and John Fraser, Massey’s Master; old Atwood friends Adrienne Clarkson, John Ralston Saul, Anna and Julian Porter; and her partner, Graeme Gibson. Atwood was fighting a cold and saving her voice for the next day’s speech, the final one in the year’s annual Massey Lectures, for which she’d written the book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Before the carrot soup (the same colour as the monarch wings), guinea hen and polenta, Atwood’s colleagues praised her stamina and prescience. The stamina part explained the butterfly wings. Writing Payback in two and a half months, she told them, was like being trapped in a “chrysalis of punishment.” Her prescience, everybody agreed, was breathtaking. On September 7, exactly one month before her book’s publication date, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America’s biggest mortgage-finance companies, were placed under government control and the stock market went into free fall. Within days, the Wall Street Journal began petitioning Atwood’s publisher to let them run a sizable excerpt. The Times of London published an excerpt on September 26, “Questions for Margaret Atwood” appeared in The New York Times Magazine on September 28, and an op-ed piece ran in The New York Times on October 22. The book shot to the top of best-seller lists in Canada. By the end of November, it was in its fourth printing and had sold more than any previous Massey Lectures book.

In the last months of 2008, Atwood seemed omnipresent as well as omniscient—two of the attributes of the divine. But although she has been dazzling us for almost 40 years, she’s too quirky to be mistaken for a goddess. She has more in common with Cassandra, the beautiful mortal to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy, more often for bad news than good. Readers first noticed this in 1985, when Atwood anticipated the stranglehold of America’s neo-conservative evangelicalism with the world of religious fundamentalism and female subjugation she created for The Handmaid’s Tale, and again in 2003, when the global pandemic she described in Oryx and Crake collided with the real-life outbreak of SARS.

Of course, Payback is not about the mortgage meltdown or the stock market slide. Written in the conversational, occasionally jokey style Atwood has trademarked for her non-fiction, it is a big-picture look at all kinds of debt—moral, theological, financial, even ecological. Rather than a sustained argument, it’s more like a series of snapshots of a subject, or a brisk walk, taking different routes around an idea. And no doubt that’s what the newspapers liked about the book, that it was a more philosophical way to think about the crumbling economy than yesterday’s stock numbers. To the group gathered at Massey, the book was more proof of Atwood’s unpredictable, many-faceted braininess.

THE MASSEY LECTURES have been an annual institution since 1961. It’s a prestigious podium, graced over the decades by Northrop Frye, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Jacobs. The series is also the biggest source of income for Anansi, the boutique publisher that releases the book on which the lectures are based. When the lectures are a hit—as were 1993’s pro-humanism talks by John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization—they become part of the Canadian zeitgeist.

The Massey organizers—CBC Radio, Anansi and Massey College—had approached Atwood repeatedly for 15 years. Finally, she agreed. Why? “They wore me down,” she says simply, and then mimics a girl who doesn’t want to go on a date. “ ‘Can you go out on Friday?’ ‘Sorry, I’m washing my hair that night.’ ‘Saturday?’ ‘No, washing my hair again.’ ‘Sunday?’ ‘No, sorry,’ and so on. I ran out of excuses.”

At first, she chose as her subject “the sociobiology of literary criticism,” especially how a writer’s critical reception is affected by his or her gender and age. It was a topic close to her heart, as male critics had often taken her writing less than seriously. But gradually she lost interest: her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford and her Empson Lectures at Cambridge had treated literary topics, and she wanted a change.