We lived in the gaps between the stories.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I picked up a copy of The Handmaid's Tale at the library, a small rectangle of yellow paper slid out from between its pages: a folded post-it note with the words "I love you mom and dad" in a child's scrawl, in blue pen, beside a drawing of a sun and a cloud. A token left behind (intentionally or unintentionally) by a previous borrower, it accumulated a strange weight as I made my way through the book and became acquainted with the world portrayed inside: a world where a mother would never be told that she is loved, and where paper, pen, and even the alphabet would be inaccessible for half the population.

The story takes place in a version of North America where widespread infertility led to a violent, extremist faction taking over the government and instituting systematic subjugation of women. Part of this subjugation took the form of assigning women to strict roles: ornaments, housekeepers, toys, or - for the few still capable - wombs. This last group were the handmaids, who always dressed in head-to-toe red, and who exchanged their real name for the name of the man they were assigned to. This story is told by Offred (Of Fred), who describes her experiences as a handmaid and, in parallel, reflects on her earlier life.

For a story with so much strife unfolding in the background, the tone is remarkably muted. Offred is not the outright rebel that one might hope to read about. Her early failure to question authority precedes her eventual (apparent) passivity as a handmaid. She doesn't know as much about events in the outside world as one might like, creating a feeling of being inside a quiet, delicate bubble.

The writing is simultaneously intricate and smooth. The words could flow by almost effortlessly, but I often forced myself to read more slowly so that I could appreciate the eloquence and the double (triple, quadruple...) meanings of what was written. Plus, it's not necessarily a book that I wanted to go through quickly - each page seemed to anticipate some new disturbing calamity. I normally dislike cliffhanger endings, but in this case I thought the ending worked perfectly and was very much in the spirit of the rest of the book. The epilog took things to an entirely new level.

As scary and suspenseful as the book can be, it is not so much a futuristic horror story as it is a merging of things women have experienced in various places, at various times in history, brought into a setting that is more likely to hit home for modern readers in the western world. Readers who, themselves, might not give much thought to the impositions and expectations that they are constantly surrounded by.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

[Read Harder Challenge task: a science fiction novel.]

View all my reviews