The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale was a great book for fostering discussion amongst members and it was a lively meeting in August. Some members are watching the series on SBS on Demand but to really get a sense of what this book is on about you need to read it! As the meme going around on Facebook says: Don’t judge a book by its movie! (Or in this case, its television series.)

In The Handmaid’s Tale we enter an American dystopian world governed by rigid rules of religious fundamentalism under a violent totalitarian regime. Human fertility has declined due to a range of factors inferred by the regime as the mistakes of the previous generations. Female fertility, where it still exists, has become controlled by the regime, as justified by a biblical text: Genesis 30: 2-4. Male fertility is not under question.

The main character, Offred, was formerly a conventional woman, married with a husband and a daughter, and a career. When the story opens, three years later she has been forced to become a Handmaiden (“a womb on legs”), due to her proven fertility. She owns nothing beyond her real name (which must be kept secret) and must submit to the regime’s requirements of her in the house of one of its commanders. She is belatedly aware of the many freedoms lost to her but still desperately wants to survive. She doesn’t know what has happened to her husband or daughter.

The society is in a state of civil war; opposition is ruthlessly suppressed by the regime; there is no free movement, freedom of speech or assembly. A reactionary minority has brought about this revolutionary change, declaring a state of emergency, violently overturning the government and suspending the constitution, while pointing the blame on a group of fundamentalist Islamists.

Violent intimidation and surveillance have become the norm with the population kept in submission by the “angels”, “guardians” and “the Eyes”. Classes of people not useful to the regime are scapegoated, subjugated or removed, either killed or sent to the “colonies" as “non-people”. These include gays, negroes, old people who cannot work, deformed babies, and people who adhere to opposing religious sects like the Quakers.

Written and spoken language and the media are controlled and forbidden to the general population. Strict codes of belief and behaviour are enforced by indoctrination, retraining, brainwashing and slogans. The past has been rewritten and secular learning eradicated.

Meanwhile, the regime’s elite enjoys rights and privileges not available to other classes. Further, the Commander in the story operates under a double standard which denies the utopia he has helped the regime to set up.

While this all sounds pretty bleak there is some hope. And the writing is so good that you are carried away by the story. Members were, however, not all happy with the ending.

The larger questions which Atwood is asking in this book are: How would we react where our social position is forced on us? Would we be an Offred, passive and compliant in order to just survive and attempting to retain our sanity through secretly telling our story? Would we be her mother, who was a feminist and had in the past openly protested against the conditions of society? Or would we be an Ofglen or Nick - secretly rebelling against the regime or a Moira - ridiculing the regime to others and trying to escape from it?

Atwood is telling us through the story that we are careless and complacent about the freedoms we enjoy. That in just three years a political situation could completely change (as it did in Nazi Germany after 1937). She said in an interview that all the elements of totalitarianism she uses in the story have an historical basis. She shows us that complacency or ignoring what’s going on around us is dangerous. Members agreed that the book had a lot to tell us in 2017.

Margaret Atwood is a celebrated Canadian author and poet who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. It was a winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1985 Governor General’s Award. It was a finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize. Atwood has written 17 novels, and published 10 short fiction collections and 20 collections of poetry. She has also written children’s books, non-fiction works, television scripts and libretti. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Booker in 2000, honorary degrees and Orders.

Other dystopian novels you might like to read (there are heaps more) include:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (and the other titles in the Trilogy)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Blind Faith by Ben Elton
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Making History by Stephen Fry
The Stand by Stephen King
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (made into the movie, Bladerunner)
Make room! Make room! by Harry Harrison (made into the movie, Solyent Green)
Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (made into the movie, A Clockwork Orange)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Trial by Franz Kafka
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Happy reading!