“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

I’m a little late to the bandwagon here, this book spectacularly resurfaced when it was made into a tv show on Hulu and everyone suddenly decided to read the book again. I hadn’t read it before, so here we are.

In the introduction, Atwood says that she was writing this in the eighties and that what she wanted to do with this book was create a future that was shocking, but that didn’t have anything wholly original about it. She just borrowed what other totalitarian or theocracies did in the past and synthesize something new from them. Like it says towards the end, there isn’t anything new about this world, it’s just the specific synthesis of ideas.

Having pointed that out, yeah, I think it’s possible for America to become a world like this someday. Which is why the tv show is so relevant, since the election everyone has been terrified of something like this happening to us. And the parallels to Nazi Germany are quite clear; I’ve always maintained that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. There is nothing fundamentally different about us now that makes contemporary America immune to hate and prejudice. Recent events have made that quite clear.

What I thought was very unique about this book though is its narrative structure. It’s entirely written in the first person, but as we learn, women aren’t allowed to read or write anymore. So throughout the story, the reader assumes that it’s simply the stream of consciousness of the narrator, a direct pipeline to her thoughts. However, at the end we learn through a fake historical gathering that this is actually a transcription of a set of tapes found. The narration is all dictated, and possibly out of order.

This throws an entirely new light on it, if the story could be out of order, then the flashbacks might not be flashbacks at all but errors in ordering the story. Which is an interesting idea, but changing around the story doesn’t really get us anywhere. But then there’s the fact that Offred (the narrator) spends plenty of time reflecting on her role as a storyteller. If this is dictated rather than a thought process, that gives her musings about who exactly this story is for a little more credibility. If we were reading her mind, there is no way that she intended that for anyone, what’s in your head tends to stay there. But it also makes her considerably more self-aware, it’s one thing to recognize that you are a flawed narrator, but it is another thing entirely to spend time on a tape talking about it. I think that it adds plenty of depth to her character, and the epilogue gives a nice ending and way to wrap up some loose ends in a satisfying way, even if most of our questions remain unanswered.