Gilead Revisited

'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood

With the release of companion piece 'The Testaments' just ten days away, I've done something I don't normally do - I've re-read a book!  So, unsure of whether it was as good as I remembered and with some trepidation, I returned to Gilead and 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood.

Following a carefully planned coup that wipes out Congress and strips civil liberties, the United States of America has been taken over by a fundamentalist Christian group and renamed 'Gilead'.  Those not purged find themselves boxed into new, sanctioned roles that mean work and above all relationships are state controlled.  With birth rates low and people needed to fight ongoing wars, the rulers of Gilead assign senior personnel 'Handmaids', fertile women to be ritually raped in the hope that they will provide the Commanders and their Wives with children.  'Offred' is one of the first wave of Handmaids, haunted by memories of the life she had before, fearful for the future of her lost daughter, and stunned into compliance by the isolating existence she now endures as an object of desire and moral revulsion.  As the shock begins to fade, however, she starts to see that things are not quite as godly as the regime would like believed, and even those at the highest levels are showing signs of very human weakness...

Sometimes, when you fall in love with a book or a film or an album in your 20s, then revisit it later, the flaws smack you in the face like a jackboot.  Attitudes and behaviours that wouldn't have caught your eye at the time suddenly stand out, not only tainting but dominating to the extent that you can't understand why you ever liked the work, nevermind loved it.  Fortunately - and possibly the reason that it's become such a successful TV series and recaptured the public interest - 'The Handmaid's Tale' has managed to improve with time.  Atwood has said that everything in the book has happened somewhere in the world. As my knowledge of the terrible things human beings can do to each other in the name of ideology has grown over the intervening years, so has the relevance and gravitas of this book.  As such, it's even more emotive than when I first read it.

Whereas I finished the first reading with a sense of 'The Handmaid's Tale' as a floating miasma of awesome ideas, I ended the second feeling it as a solid presence.  Having taken the book apart initially - marvelling at the linguistic playfulness, tense storyline and chilling politics - I think I appreciated it as a skillfully produced work of fiction, but failed to reassemble it back into a whole and recognise it as a statement of truths.  While I don't think 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a predictive text, it is an intelligent reminder of what could be, a warning from her-story.

If you haven't read 'The Handmaid's Tale', particularly if you're a woman, read it.  Even if you don't believe science or speculative fiction is your thing, or you think it's a 'clever' book and not for you, give it a try.  Offred's narration is plain, accessible and worryingly relatable and there are moments of recognition in the story that should make us all sit up and take notice.  The challenge isn't in reading 'The Handmaid's Tale', it's in ignoring its reflection of real life and avoiding the questions you find yourself asking having read it.

So, blessed be the fruit of Atwood's imagination.  And as for 'The Testaments', may we all open.

Now, what next..?

This review is based on a paperback copy of 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood published by Vintage in 1996.