Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood: 
The Handmaid’s Tale (4*)

Having come to realise that the horrifically violent television serialisation of The Handmaid’s Tale exceeds by far anything in the original, I got the book. I certainly would not watch it. From what I’ve read, the televised version falls little short of militant Islamic beheading videos.

So, what did I make of the book? In essence, it’s a bit silly. Am I going to get into in trouble for saying that? It is feminist fiction about the subjugation of women in a totalitarian patriarchy. 

In the Republic of Gilead, women are the property of men. Some even take the names of the men to whom they belong. The narrator, Offred, ‘Of-Fred’ (sounds like ‘offered’), belongs to Fred, a ‘Commander’. She is one of the handmaids whose role is to bear children to leading men when their wives no longer can. Other women have other specified roles.

Handmaids wear colour-coded religious habits with winged hoods to prevent seeing anywhere other than on the ground ahead. They are pious and submissive, and walk with bowed heads. They are not allowed to read or write, or look at others, with compliance enforced by a system of severe physical punishments. Once each month, they are ceremonially raped by their commanders and their wives until they either conceive or are discarded.

Offred may go out, but only in the company of another handmaid, Ofglen. They are only allowed to whisper in permitted phrases.

… we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us…
“Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.
“May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response.
… “The war is going well, I hear,” she says,
“Praise be,” I reply.
“We’ve been sent good weather.”
“Which I receive with joy.” (p29)

They pass through checkpoints and look at executed corpses hanging on a wall. Offred secretly needs to know that her husband from her previous life is not among them.

And here lies my problem. Offred, and everyone else in the republic, previously lived in a free Western society. She had her own name, friends, summer dresses, a house, a car, a cat, a husband, a child and a career. Then, suddenly, one day she finds her bank account has been frozen, and on arriving at work that she and all women have been “let go” from their jobs. She and her husband try unsuccessfully to escape. She is sent to a training school to learn her new duties.

It remains vague how long it took to establish the republic, how big it is or how its economy works. The changes seem to have taken place within just a few years because Offred previously had a child and is still of child-bearing age. Gilead also seems quite small but there are references to slaves, colonies and wars. Tourists and trade delegations visit from ‘normal’ countries. It is difficult to imagine how such a place could function.

In other words, albeit an entertaining read, I find the concept ridiculous. Whereas the post apocalyptic society in, say, The Chrysalids, is entirely believable, this is not. Could we really within the space of a few years move from a present day western society to one in which women are slaves to cardboard-character men and forced to take specific roles? Would we have stood for it?

But I’ve been had. I’ve taken it too literally. It’s a satire. It does not matter whether it could be possible. What matters is that this is what a brutal patriarchy, or any other repressive regime, might feel like. And yet, for me, it gave no strong sense of terror or foreboding. Perhaps the televised version does. I’m still not going to watch it. I have no desire to read the recent sequel, The Testaments, either.

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985. Today, this kind of tyranny would be more of a possibility through big data, compulsory device tracking, surveillance cameras and denial of rights to specific groups or individuals, which could be any of us, men or women. Indeed, in some parts of the world, we can see it happening now. How far could it go?

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Sooty

This is Sooty, the first of five cats I’ve shared a home with. He wasn’t black all over but we called him Sooty anyway because it was a good name for a cat.

He came as a six-week old kitten from a friend’s cat’s litter when I was nine or ten. Oblivious of the omnipotent choice I was making, I picked the one I wanted when they were just a few days old and never thought to ask what became of the others. On the day he came to us, he lay on the carpet in a patch of sun as I built around him with my toy wooden bricks, buzzing in a peculiar way.

He would lie on the hearth rug stretched out by the fire, or sit in the garden with his fur puffed out looking cute. He would go to sleep in the best chair, paws trembling as he dreamed, furry radar ears tracking every sound. When it suited him, he would jump up to your knee, turn round a few times paws kneading, and settle down, soft and warm, fur moving to the rhythm of his breathing.

But in a house with two boys he was teased a lot. Worse, I saw the lad who sometimes stayed next door swing him by his tail. He quickly learned to stand up for himself and could be vicious. He was fearless. He would run up behind, encircle your ankle with his front legs, sink in claws and teeth, and scuff vigorously with his hind claws as if trying to disembowel you. It could be nasty if he got your arm and brutal if you tried to pull away. His tail would be going like a windscreen wiper. My arms and legs were usually scarred in weals and scratches. 

Later, we moved. He ran back and forth between the front and back windows of the new house, disorientated, looking out and miaowing pathetically. When he eventually settled he spent hours stalking in the long grass in a field at the back.

We built a house of cards and rolled chocolate Maltesers underneath so he would chase them and put his head through the cards. It took rather a lot of sweets to get the right shot. “Cat crunching up chocolate covered malted milk ball” might have made a good picture too. “Cat being sick”, maybe not.

I know now that chocolate is toxic to cats but, according to the next-door neighbour, he sneaked upstairs in her house, ate some of her chocolates, and hid the paper wrappers under her bed. Another day, he came home covered in tar which had to be cleaned off with petrol. On another occasion, he swallowed around eighteen inches (45cm) of string which came back out of his throat like one of those animal-shaped retractable tape measures with tape that pulls out of its mouth.

How many lives do cats have? I still wonder whether that ‘string’ led to his final undoing. Rather than string, it was actually quarter-inch wide (0.5 cm) paper ribbon, used to tie up brown paper parcels, with the name of the shop repeated along its length. I haven’t seen any like it for years. He might have mistaken it for grass. It also had a slightly fishy smell. The edges were sharp enough to give you a paper cut. Did it damage his mouth? 

Two or three years later, after I left home, my mother, who, of course, always looked after his food and litter tray, thought he was finding it difficult to eat because of something stuck in his throat. He had lost weight. One bank-holiday Tuesday, I drove them to the vet. Sooty was kept in for further investigations and I returned to work in Leeds. Not being in constant communication as we are now, I did not hear what happened until Friday. He had a large tumour at the back of his tongue and the vet advised putting him to sleep. He was ten and a half years old.