Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!
Audio book sadly read by Betty Harris.
This is, according to Atwood, speculative fiction, but I don't think she knows the difference between dystopian, speculative, and sci-fi. Either that or I don't! It's about a future USA where life has changed dramatically after a terrorist attack which kills the president and congress. The attack is carried out by a group of religious nut-jobs which then allows another group of religious nut-jobs, calling themselves 'the Sons of Jacob' to take over. This of course would never happen, not even in the USA, but that's the premise we're dealing with here.
The SoJ quickly takes over, suspending the constitution, and removing all women's rights by confiscating their financial records. This is the part that couldn't happen. Most women would never let this happen, and neither would most men.
The biggest problem I had was with how very quickly this occurs. The narrator, the main character, is a woman in her early thirties, and she remembers very well what things were like before, which means she must have been in high school (or older), which in turn means that this all not only took place, but became solidly cemented in place, in twenty years or less, which isn't feasible.
Yes, Atwood does represent life as an ongoing war between the Republic of Gilead (how did that name change ever come about and why?) and 'the rebels', but we're never really told anything about the rebels, nor is the complete absence of Islamic forces addressed. If the Islamic terrorists conducted this hugely successful attack in the first place, then why are there not insurgents flocking to the USA as they did to Iraq? Why aren't they flocking there anyway? The secret is that this novel was written and published thirty years ago, so a lot gets lost in the translation of the years.
So the premise of the story is weak, but if you're willing to let that go, it becomes a bit more interesting, and some of the things she writes are prescient. She doesn't include anything that isn't happening, or that hasn't happened as a result of ridiculous religion.
That said, I felt that Atwood rambled far too much about unimportant details at the beginning, larding the novel with a rather amateurish info-dump, which keeps on giving. There is far too much tedious detail. I read this some time back and decided to give it another try for a review, but I simply could not stay with it the second time around, and the mediocre reading of Betty Harris didn't help at all.
On top of that, I've never been a fan of first-person PoV novels, as this one is. Some are enjoyable, but most of them, for me, kick me right out of suspension of disbelief because it's far too absurd to me to credit that a narrator can tell a story in such detail, especially if they're supposedly telling it as it happens. It's ridiculous and unnatural. It's also extraordinarily limiting on the writer, but that's not even the worst problem here.
The conceit of this novel is that this story was recovered from audio tape after the Republic of Gilead had been overturned. What better opportunity could there have been than to make this dramatic as though it was really and truly the actual audio tape we were listening to? But no - it was wasted, which I think is a crying shame and a huge black mark against this audio version for me.
The main character is Offred (Of Fred - meaning owned by Fred). While I thought this was a cool name, I did wonder, if the commander had two such handmaidens, what the second one would be called. Perhaps they're permitted only one at a time. She's kept only for two years, and solely for reproductive purposes, and as such is in some ways privileged, but in other ways is disparaged as little more than a prostitute.
Offred is in the unenviable position of wishing that she will become impregnated by her rapist quickly because this will in effect maintain her 'market price' by demonstrating that she's fertile. If she fails, she could lose her 'privileged' position. I mean: what use could a woman possibly be, if she cannot have children, we're asked to accept here, and indeed, this has been a fundamental motivation of fundamentalism ever since religion began. This is one of those cases where humanity is supposedly largely sterile - in this case due to pollution and STDs, which is not really credible either, but that's what we have.
This is Offred's third such two-year 'assignment'. If she fails to become pregnant this time, then she will be classed as an 'unwoman' and be forced to the colonies to clean up nuclear pollution and die an early death. This time, her experience is different in that while The Commander is supposed only to have sex with her during The Ceremony (with his own wife present as a witness (lying underneath the handmaiden as the commander labors over her to try and bring on labor nine months hence), he wants Offred much more than this, and bribes her with illicit materials such as magazines, cosmetics, and the chance to read.
The bizarre thing is that The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is also plying Offred with inducements to get pregnant by encouraging her to have sex with The Commander's driver, Nick - so yes, it's quite literally a cluster-fuck, especially when The Commander's wife discovers Offred's extended relationship with The Commander, and Nick tells Offred that he can facilitate her escape - if she trusts him.
So it could have been a really great novel, but it failed because there was too much tedium between the interesting bits (and limited bits they were). Atwood is a great fan of telling; not so much with the showing. I can't recommend this. Go read Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman if you want a truly feminist PoV.
