Book Review: A Handmaid's Tale

A Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

I’d been meaning to read this for years, but was put off by ignoramuses who assumed that I couldn’t appreciate anything serious because I also read “fluffy” science fiction. Finally, it came up as a choice for my monthly book group. So I read it at last, although I don’t wholly regret the delay: nothing sucks the enjoyment of a novel like the autopsy of an English class, presuming that one has the capacity to enjoy literature.

A Handmaid’s Tale presents a fable rather than a straightforward future dystopia; the difference between the two is that a fable stretches the effect and obscures the details of the cause. The milieu of the novel is an extension and exaggeration of the policies of the Moral Majority, the evangelical conversative movement of the 1980’s. The protagonist is Offred, the eponymous “handmaid”, a survivor from the previous regime. Both the current society and the past one are exaggerations, to an extent that would be comic in another setting. I am uncertain, however, how much Offred’s perception of the past society has been contaminated by her present circumstances. These present circumstances consist of an oppressive patriarchy in a world,(or at least the “Republic of Gilead”) rendered increasingly sterile by chemicals and radiation, in which the remaining potentially fertile women serve as “handmaids” to the wives of Commanders, a structure borrowed from the Book of Genesis. Perhaps the effect was more chilling at the time, or perhaps it is more dependant on gender than such dystopian classics as 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but I did not receive quite the same level of oppressive fear as I did from those works; it still reaches impressive levels of oppression. There are elements, such as the color coding explicitly outlined in the beginning of the book, which could have benefited from expansion. The penultimate chapter was suitably Orwellian, and the last chapter drew more inspiration from the twenty-first chapter of A Clockwork Orange. The last chapter of A Handmaid’s Tale feels forced, even though the collapse of the Republic of Gilead is implicit in the other chapters.