The Handmaid's Tale

This is an excellent book. I read the first half in one go and only put it down because it was really late and I had to get up early the next morning. I had trouble sleeping because I couldn't put it out of my mind. I then spent the next day thinking about it. So it's a book that haunts you. However, the second part of the book didn't have the same effect on me. I didn't connect so much with it, and the gut punches weren't as effective.

I still recommend this to everyone, obviously. But it's not an easy read. There was a moment when I had to put the book down and take a couple of minutes before I took it up again (the visit to the doctor, if you're curious) because I was so disgusted by what was happening that I couldn't keep reading. I think Atwood writes the story masterfully, because the protagonist sometimes throws details like they are irrelevant for her, and they are a really strong punch to the stomach for readers. I was angry and disgusted through most of the book.

This is obviously a feminist book, denouncing the way women are treated in most societies. However, what I liked the most is not the big stuff, like the way women are treated in Gilead. I really loved the details, how it denounces more subtle misogyny. It's obvious to anyone reading that Gilead is a sexist society, but then there's things like Luke being a bit of a misogynist pig, or some of the comments the Commander makes. I did like the setting too, but what I enjoyed the most about this book were the little things.

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2nd time - May 2022

I liked it better this time. I still have some trouble connecting with the protagonist, because I find her unlikeable. It's a tragedy that, old as this novel is, every time I read it, it's still perfectly current.

My rating for this is deeply personal; many people hate this book for the same reasons I love it. Some people love it for reasons I don't.

First, to me, this is obviously a dramatization of the 1979 Revolution in Iran and its aftermath, transposed to the US. Tehran went from a very liberal, highly Westernized city to a combination of Sharia law and "revolutionary justice" under martial law within a few short years. So while there is a sense of "it could happen here" that's spooked people for decades -- this IS the Dominionist goal in a nutshell -- the exact story isn't a total fit for the US, especially given the changes in the decades since publication. Dominionism reached the height of its power around the turn of the millennium, and has faded since, to be replaced by other forms of extremism.

That said, the premise isn't unbelievable enough to detract from the story.

And what a story it is. Meandering, jumping across time in memories and vignettes, sometimes explicitly admitting an untruth and sometimes leaving truth open to interpretation, as if it was really being told out loud. Incredibly, intensely, breathtakingly poetic at times; there are florid passages about the garden that make my heart break. Full of musing and deliberation, sometimes regret and sometimes an iron refusal to regret. Characters that offset the narrator in many different ways, so that her meekness doesn't become a one-note portrait of femininity throughout.

Those same charges have been leveled against it by detractors. We all enjoy what we enjoy, and roll our eyes at what others enjoy. You'll know if you enjoy those things.

Not that everything was perfect, of course. The drips of memory are deliberately coy right to the end, ensuring that each piece of the past is a cliffhanger to tide you over to the next. The epilogue is clumsy and ill-fitting, an experiment like the main story that doesn't hold up as well.

In the end, I connected with most of then characters in this book, and with the overall theme. I'm not afraid of it, but it's been at the back of my mind for years. That duality is where the book lives and thrives.

One of the best elements of compelling dystopia is imagining how circumstances might evolve from reality to the fiction at hand. You end up finding the elements that the author believes are dangerous about the real world, or think would sustain an authoritarian system. The Handmaiden's tale is first about women, and how men might respond to a world in which fertility has become a priceless commodity. It's also about how authoritarian regimes sustain themselves, and that I thought was particularly telling and poignant. The state in the Handmaid's tale is not as omnipresent as it is in, say, 1984. It works largely through social hierarchies of control, men ruling a household, women achieving status through the men and regulating the behavior of women beneath them, and finally, through fear, the individuals regulating themselves. I thought the main character's navigating her place at the bottom of the elite hierarchy was very compelling, and thought it emphasized for me about how repressive systems can exert control on individuals without the need for guns and armor on every street corner.

The ending was particularly satisfying. There is an afterward that many of the disparate elements of the story together into something cohesive, but it doesn't answer all the questions. I liked that. So much of a good story is trying to see around the corners where the author hasn't written anything, and to have these guesses resolved is very satisfying. But Atwood doesn't wrap it all up - she resolves many of the questions, and then dangles a few more as loose ends that will never be resolved. This is how it should be.