Canadian author Margaret Atwood explores the concept of debt as a central motif in human society in her new book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

AP / LEFTERIS PITARAKIS

Anyone looking for a practical alternative to staring dumbly at financial Armageddon may find a little solace in Margaret Atwood’s guide to the psychic underpinnings of the credit crisis.

In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, the prescient novelist and poet doesn’t so much try to explain the nitty gritty of the current situation as take a hard look at mankind’s long, difficult relationship with money and the consequences when balance sheets get seriously out of kilter.

“This is the financial world’s meltdown,” Atwood says in an interview over a cappuccino in her hometown of Toronto. “If you want to ascribe an entity to it, you’d probably have to say the deity controlling fairness and balance has just kicked back.”

Atwood proves with Payback, which was recently released in Canada, the U.S. and U.K., that she has an impeccable knack for timing. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood’s novel about religious fanaticism permeating U.S. society, preceded the rise of the Taliban and America’s religious right.

Oryx and Crake, a creepy tale about genetic engineering and pandemics, was published in 2003 as those issues were rising to prominence.

Now Payback is landing in bookstores just as plunging stock indexes erase trillions of dollars of equity, and government officials stumble over themselves to save credit markets from collective cardiac arrest.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Atwood, 68, says with a smile after I find her sitting alone in a quiet cafe wearing a black cardigan buttoned up to the neck.

“I saw it coming,” she says of the credit crisis, “but I didn’t know when it would come.”

Atwood says she began planning a book on debt about three years ago, after the U.S. had started spending heavily to quell the insurgency in Iraq. Payback was then conceived as Atwood’s topic for Canada’s Massey Lectures series, which had been scheduled for the second half of next year.

That date changed serendipitously after Atwood’s U.S. publisher, Doubleday, persuaded her in January to delay another project — a novel — by one year because of fears the publication would be overshadowed by the Nov. 4 U.S. election. That freed up this fall for Payback and the Massey lecture tour, which Atwood is now scheduled to give this month in five cities across Canada.

In Payback, Atwood harnesses a riot of biblical, literary, historical and hysterical anecdotes to show how the concept of debt has become one of the most powerful motifs in the human imagination. Atwood throws in examples as diverse as the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (“Emma isn’t really punished for sex but for shopaholicism”) and scientific studies on capuchin monkeys and chimps.

Atwood shows how we’ve been inundated through the ages with admonitions against going into debt, noting, for instance, that the word mortgage is made up of two French words that mean death and pledge.

If the concepts are so entrenched, how did we get to the point where so many consumers, not to mention corporations and governments, have fallen dangerously into the red?

“It really started spiraling when the credit card hit big time,” Atwood says. “They would mail them to you and then you suddenly felt richer.” Add to that the rise of “financial gurus” who increasingly encouraged people to take on debt by saying, “You can always borrow against your house; it will always increase in value.”

Atwood sees apocalypse looming, though less in the sense of catastrophe than in terms of “the moment when things are revealed.”

“There will certainly be a reorganization of people’s mental attitudes,” Atwood says. “The neocon, deregulate-everything, this-will-make-us-rich philosophy of two weeks ago is toast.”