Book Review: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood

How have I never read one of Margaret Atwood’s books before? For my 2024 summer holiday I decided to give The Handmaid’s Tale a try. The Handmaid’s Tale is arguably Atwood’s most famous work (largely due to the 2017 TV series of the same name starring Elizabeth Moss). Knowing how things can change from book to adaptation I was very curious to read Atwood’s original novel.

I hadn’t realised that The Handmaid’s Tale was published back in 1985 – old enough to now be considered a vintage classic according to the edition I bought. The dystopian story feels timeless in the disturbing sense that I could imagine the events of the novel happening at any period of history.

In the book much of America is overthrown and replaced with the heavily structured totalitarian society of Gilead which is based on extreme interpretations of Christianity. After a plague of infertility causes a sharp drop in population, the founders of Gilead believe they’ve created the solution. A few privileged men become Commanders with the Wives running the household. Each pair is given a Handmaid – a fertile woman who is forced to become a surrogate mother and provide the Commander with a child. Successful Handmaidens are then given to a new Commander and the process starts again.

The story follows Offred’s journey from the years immediately prior to the rise of Gilead to her forced training under the eyes of the ruthless Aunts to life as one of Gilead’s original Handmaidens.

Instead of always focusing on specific events, the novel instead examines the emotions of each scene. We learn Offred’s thoughts and feelings and follow her stream of consciousness. This does lead to a rather random organisation of the novel’s plot. Rather than traditional chronological storytelling each chapter jumps backwards and forwards between scenes and time periods. At the end of the novel we learn that the story we are reading is Offred’s verbal account of her experiences. The human mind frequently jumps between topics and gets momentarily distracted when it recalls past events so, from this perspective, I feel Atwood does a very good job of naturally conveying the human thought process. However I was sometimes confused by the unexpected time shifts in the middle of chapters which temporarily took me out of the story as it felt like I was actually reading several different stories at once.

The Handmaid’s Tale falls into the category of ‘speculative fiction’ and to me the book could also be placed into the genre of ‘alternative history’. The complete reimagining of society as shown in the novel is Atwood’s way of asking: what if? If the deliberately extreme society of Gilead existed what would it look like and how would people react within it?

Despite its rules the inhabitants of Gilead we meet are often quite contradictory. For example the Commander has all of the power and status society can offer yet he still feels compelled to break the rules through his unauthorised one-on-one interactions with Offred. His wife, Serena Joy, helped to create the foundations of Gilead society but now she is trapped by that same creation – unable to earn money or even read.

Then there are the Handmaidens.

The property of the Commander she is currently assigned to, Offred’s name (given to her by Gilead) literally means Of-Fred. Indoctrinated by the Aunts, the Handmaidens’ identities are striped from them and Offred’s true name is never explicated stated in the novel.

I like that, through the Aunts and Handmaidens, Atwood showcases a range of different attitudes to life in Gilead. Firstly the Aunts, like the formidable Aunt Lydia, are older women who seem to be true believers of Gilead’s extreme philosophy although this is possibly due to the position of power they hold in the social hierarchy. Offred comes across as subservient yet she is always quietly pushing against her boundaries to see what small freedoms she can gain. Her walking/shopping partner Ofglen is far more pro-active with rebel connections and a desire to tear down the new system. In contrast to them both is Ofwarren who is described as unpopular amongst the other Handmaidens due to her choice to fully commit to Gilead’s way of life in order to survive and be safe within it. These differences between the characters helps to make this society more believable. Even in a dystopian world there have to be people for whom it is a utopia in order for it to work. Equally, in terms of storytelling, there need to be characters like Offred and Ofglen who want to fight back in order for there to be enough conflict to drive the plot.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a reasonable 314 pages for anyone like me who is curious about the book. There are plenty of breaks in the story which made it a fairly quick read. Overall I liked the novel but didn’t love the constant jumps in time. The book works as both an interesting though experiment and as a feminist dystopia. As I said, this was my first time reading one of Atwood’s books and I’d certainly be open to reading more of her work in the future.

---

Related Posts:

If you enjoyed this review then you may also like these reviews: