The Handmaid's Tale by
Margaret Atwood
Reason for Reading: This is
another of those books that I really ought to have read an age ago, and in fact
it's been on my challenge lists as long as I've been setting myself reading
challenges. I've heard abridged versions, but with the adaptation and the state
of the world making it such a relevant talking point, this felt like the moment
to go the whole hog.
Set in the not too distant future, The
Handmaid's Tale is the story of Offred, a handmaid in the theocratic
post-America of Gilead, a society in which faith is a cudgel and fertile women
are assigned to the households of the childless elite to bear children for
them. It's a nightmarish dystopia, yet one not a million miles from where we
live today, with the flashbacks to the emergence of Gilead through a series of
executive orders and incremental cessation of liberty as salutary a warning as
ever they were. Offred's story is explicitly an unreliable narrative, which the
epilogue suggests could as easily be some sort of post-Gilead propaganda as a
genuine account of the times, but only in the personal sense. The wider
narrative never questions the nature of Gilead - the tyranny and corruption,
the hypocritical theocracy, the grim subjugation of women's reproductive
faculties - only the individual narrative which provides it with a personal,
emotional context, which is, in itself, a commentary on the drive to
personalise 'history', both in and out of fiction. By focusing on Offred(1), The
Handmaid's Tale gives us an individual to connect with, but the epilogue gives
us one last caution by reminding the reader that actually the horror of this
story is not that it is happening to one specific person, but that it is happening
to everyone.
Of course, the real problem with reviewing The Handmaid's Tale is finding something new to say about it. It's
not just a classic, but its recent adaptation pushed it back to the forefront
of cultural discussion, so basically anything that was going to be said about
it - its original relevance, its contemporary resonance, its literary value and
influence - has been said more than once. On a more personal level, it would be
untrue to say that I enjoyed it -
it's hard skating, and portrays a horrible nation in mundane detail - but I
certainly appreciated it.
(1) One of the things that an audio adaptation can hide is that the handmaids' names are in the form 'Of X', where X is the name of their Commander, thus further annihilating their individuality; the one on BBC 7 pronounced them all 'off' as if they were a government regulatory and inspecting body
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