In the final sections of the book, she invokes a character called Scrooge Nouveau. He is wealthy beyond average expectations, and he owns many corporations. He believes he owes himself every way of making his life more luxurious and every shot at fulfilling his desires because, well, hasn’t he earned it? And so he goes about, till one day a Spirit visits him and takes him off on a virtual tour of the world as it now is — from the melting icecaps in the Antarctic to the fast depleting rainforests in the Amazon, from a Genoese colony on the coast of the Black Sea dealing with the ravages of Black Death in the 14th century to the food riots that rocked many parts of the world last year. SN, expert at reading corporate results, is, in other words, given a bird’s eye view introduction to Nature’s cost-benefit analysis, and the consequences of imbalances in the ledger.
In a bareboned recap, this may sound simplistic. Read in its entirety, the book certainly is not. Many readers will not agree with all of Atwood’s takes on the subject of debt, but each will be provoked into her own theories. What fun.