★★★★★ | Science Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | GoodreadsÂ
I was slow to pick up this classic dystopian novel, but now I’m glad I waited. Had I read this five years ago, it would have struck me as merely imaginative. But the current political environment, coupled with a recent study of history, particularly the rise of Nazi Germany, made the premise of this book seem all too plausible. In fact, there’s very little here that isn’t drawn from some dark period in our human history, which adds to the novel’s prophetic feel.
I had forgotten what a gifted writer and storyteller Margaret Atwell is. Her lush descriptions of Offred’s world feel cinematic, as if her obscured eyesight transforms her vision into a panning camera.
Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.
Her use of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks and the near-silent whisperings of other handmaids to dole out the backstory on how this grotesque world came to be was deftly done.
It’s been suggested that great science fiction holds society up to a kind of funhouse mirror, distorting and stretching it so that it can be examined in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. What Atwood has done with The Handmaid’s Tale is show us a much more realistic mirror with a stark warning: Objects are closer than they appear.
Highlights
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.
Yesterday was July the fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it. September first will be Labor Day, they still have that. Though it didn’t used to have anything to do with mothers.
As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.