Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Book Review - Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Published by: Everyman's Library
Publication Date: 1985
Format: Hardcover, 350 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Offred once had a husband. She once had a daughter. She once had a different name. But the United States fell. It feel so fast that it's hard to remember what it was like. There was a constitution, there were rights, but they were suspended. Women who could reproduce became a valuable commodity. They were rounded up and distributed to the ruling elite. Offred is a handmaid to her Commander. Hopefully, God willing, she will provide him with an heir. It's best not to think what would happen if she's unable to conceive. She has her daily routine, shopping for the household as a way to be useful and keep herself healthy for reproductive purposes, and lots of time to think on all that she has lost and the little she has. The room with the bed and the desk and the window. The room with the carving from it's previous occupant, the previous Offred: "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum." Yet soon Offred's life starts to change. The Commander has a shrewish wife who used to be televangelist and now does nothing by garden and knit and long for the baby Offred will give her. This has distanced the couple and the Commander feels a void, a void he fills by inviting Offred to come into his study. At first they only play Scrabble, a wordy luxury to Offred. Soon she is given magazines and moisturizer. She knows she's playing a deadly game, if she were to be caught, if his wife were to find out... but "his wife" found out once before when she first met her husband Luke... But when the Commander invites Offred to a "special club" she can't help but notice the hypocrisy. Yet there is also hope. Yes, there is an easy way out, a way the other Offred took, but perhaps she can find another way...

If you're an avid book reader there are books that everyone just assumes you've read. Certain classics that make up the bedrock of the literary world. If you actually admit that the only Dickens you've dabbled in is a perfunctory reading of A Christmas Carol and that you prefer the movie version with Mickey the Mouse they might throw you out of the club. Of course it's not that I don't have these classics by the titans of the literary world, it's that I've just never gotten around to reading them. There are A LOT of books in the world and my "to be read" pile is so staggering it could possibly crush me to death if it was to fall on me, so I hope I'll be forgiven for slowly getting around to these classics. This is one of the reasons for my "theme months." They give me a focus. That month I'll tackle E.M. Forster and get around to reading all his work. Or those months I'll do nothing but indulge in Sherlock Holmes. This way I create content for my blog while getting myself to read the books that are de rigueur. One book that's been languishing was The Handmaid's Tale. Yes, yes, I know, it's been a long time coming, but see above! I can easily see why this book is a Classic with a capital "C." I read this book almost two months ago but it's still with me. I can't help thinking about it all the time. I think waiting to read The Handmaid's Tale until now gave the book more impact. In fact, at the moment reading any dystopian literature makes it seem eerily prescient and also, in some way, a rebellion. These books are a how to not end up in the same situation. You can see the correlations yet see how you can revolt! I can easily see the government oppressing women to this extent because every day there's some new and crazy legislation trying to take away our rights. But we have to fight. We have to keep ourselves informed. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum!

What's interesting about The Handmaid's Tale is that our heroine Offred is unlikable. I know you might not agree with my opinion, she's oppressed, trapped, ritually raped, she is a sympathetic character in regard to her situation, but her situation and who she is are two separate things and I just don't like her. In the "present" tense I don't like her because she's very passive, she's willing to embrace the end if she can't take it anymore, she doesn't fight, she doesn't initiate change or outright rebellion. Yes, you could say to me that by surviving and getting her story, the story of all those like her, out into the world is a rebellion, but again, her escape wasn't of her own doing, she just took it. Likewise if the escape had never presented itself she would have just stayed put. But through her we do hear the stories of interesting and likeable characters, Ofglen, Moira, and others. Women who obviously didn't make it out and who, while they might have had more interesting lives, still, at the heart, lived the same life as Offred. But this is all the "present" it's Offred's past that I have issues with, that made me not like her. She was an adulterer who waited in hotel rooms for years waiting for Luke to divorce his wife and marry her. Yes, I know this situation takes two to tango, but I just can't like her because it makes me feel like condoning cheaters. And while yes, Luke and Offred might have been "meant to be" the way they got there just doesn't sit right with me and therefore makes me dislike Offred. Again, you might be saying what she's gone through should wipe the slate clean, but the thing is, who someone is deep down, what they do informs everything, and while I can pity her I can never like her. Like that bully at school who always picks on you, you might learn what made him that way but does it make it any better when he's still attacking you?

Then there's the odd narrative structure. Yes, it's first person and tends to flow backwards and forwards with Offred's memories and associations and her desire to escape her life into the story of one of her friends, but this inner monologue doesn't help you come to terms with the lack of forward momentum. The Handmaid's Tale is structured in such a way that it's one step forward and two steps back. Every time a plot development seems about to break Offred retreats into her reveries that just stops the narrative momentum in its tracks. At times you even forget what the next plot reveal you were waiting for was. She heavy-handedly keeps talking about the ceremony wherein she copulates with her Commander and yet we have to wait 109 pages until we learn what that ceremony is! And that ceremony is mentioned right at the start of the book! I couldn't help thinking over and over again "just get on with it!" I've said to a few people who were interested in what I thought of this book that I think it's a book that would be better the second time you read it. I stand by this statement. Because after you've read it once you know what happens next so the excruciating wait for certain reveals wouldn't annoy you. After awhile, knowing that the narrative was so drawn out I found myself less and less likely to pick up the book to grab a chapter or two before bed. Books take me, on average, about a week to read as I read at speaking pace. The Handmaid's Tale took me almost three weeks to read, which is almost unheard of for me. Because it's not a long book, and it's not a book I abjectly hated, it's just a book that is plotted in such a way that you become lackadaisical about when you pick it up.

Beyond pacing, there are lots of concepts and atrocities that I had problems with, yet these are problems that are what make the book the Classic that it is. These are the ideas and issues you keep dwelling on and that make the book leave a lasting impression. But what I had the biggest problem with stylistically was The Club that Offred's Commander takes her to. The Club is a brothel in a hotel which Offred visited with Luke before they were married and is there to tend to the "needs" of the high ranking officials of Gilead, whether those are personal or diplomatic needs it doesn't matter. Now it's not the hypocrisy that bothers me, because in a country enslaving women to the will of God it makes a sick kind of sense that those in power don't obey the laws, laws that they themselves have written. What bothers me is that for the first time in the book it felt dated. In the introduction written by Valerie Martin she says that the reason this book is a classic is that it becomes more relevant the more time has passed. This struck me as so very true. Yes we can play "what if" games and think about how certain technological advances, like the Internet, would have changed the outcome, but taken as it is there is a timelessness to The Handmaid's Tale in every instance EXCEPT The Club. For the first time you can feel that this book was written in the 80s. Yes, you've known this all along, you've caught glimpses here and there but Offred arrives at that Club and wham, it's the 80s right in your face. And the thing is I can't quite put my finger on why. Is it the hotel design with it's glass elevators that anyone growing up in the 80s stayed at at one time or another? Was it the weird dishabille feathered outfit Offred dons? Was it the makeup she applied? There's not one thing on it's own, but everything in total all of a sudden dates this novel and takes away it's timelessness.

The truth is with The Club monopolizing the final third of the book with Offred's story abruptly ending shortly thereafter if it wasn't for the epilogue of "historical notes" The Handmaid's Tale would have been a tale worth quickly forgetting. The Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies gives the book a broader context. We get some indication of what happened to Offred, but more than that we learn a little about the cast of characters whom we've been spending so much time with. Hypotheses on who her Commander was, why she was called Offred (Of Fred) and so much more. Yet the "symposium" also gives a hint of what's to come in Offred's world, that it will become far harsher before it gets better. The times, the horrific times that Offred lived in are viewed by the academicians as rather lax, when having just spent all this time with Offred we know they are not. So one can draw some pretty horrific conclusions as to how much worse it got. What I also liked about this little end note was that it gave a stronger sense of reality and weight to Offred's story. She is the voice of the oppressed in Gilead. In a world where women weren't even allowed to read it's her story that survives. Her tale. Somehow these few pages made it all seem more real. I might have disliked Offred, I might have had issues in how she told her tale, but in the end the fact that her tale was told is viewed as a triumph because her voice got to be heard. This is oddly why I'm looking forward to the TV series so much. This epilogue opened up the world of Gilead more. Offred's world is so small, so cloistered, and yet there's this big world out there and I want to hear all the stories, I want to see all of this world, and then I want it burned to ash and stability and human equality returned.


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