An Introduction and My Book #1: The Handmaid's Tale

Hello, fellow bloggers and readers. I'm Kristen. I'm a reader and an editor and chaser of a very active six-month-old baby boy. Growing up, I was that kid who spent recess reading books. I'm not shooting for a specific number of books to read this year, but I still read a lot and look forward to a year of interesting book discussions.

Onto the main event: The Handmaid's Tale

Amazon does a daily deal for Kindle—namely, some deeply discounted book or other miraculously sent to my e-reader. The Handmaid's Tale looked reasonably interesting, so I indulged in a $0.99 splurge.

To quickly cover the basics, it was written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. It falls under the category of dystopian or speculative fiction. (As an aside, is it morbid how much I usually love dystopian novels?) The author derived the title from "The Handmaid's Tale" in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

In the dystopian world established by Atwood, the government has been overthrown by a fundamentalist religious group which calls itself "The Sons of Jacob." Any bank account owned by a woman became frozen—suddenly, women had no status or recognized rights except through their husbands. For the common people, society functions somewhat in a communistic format. People are given tokens that represent rations of food and other supplies. On a monthly basis, random people are executed as an example.

Presumably due to radiation and other environmental grossness, fewer and fewer women are capable of conceiving and carrying a baby to term. The radiation can cause infant mutations and other unpleasantness. The remaining fertile women are rounded up, permanently separated from their families and children, indoctrinated, sometimes tortured, and forced to become Handmaids. Handmaids are in essence sexual slaves passed around the upper echelons of society to both continue the human race and to provide children for the wealthy classes of society. The Handmaids live as pariahs and concubines, given three chances with three families to conceive and bear a child before being shipped off to the ambiguously named "Colonies" for a life of hard labor.

The main speaker throughout the novel is a Handmaid. Her name is Offred, a patronymic name given to each of the Handmaids that consists of the word "Of" and the first name of the man she serves (thus, "Of + Fred"). Any time she goes in public, she must wear red robes that sound like a combination of a nun's habit and a hijab. Her story isn't a happy one, and the whole book is rather depressing even for a dystopian novel.

Did I like it? I'm not quite sure, really. I found it interesting. It isn't a pleasure read by any means. Even fairly restrained depictions of the monthly "Ceremony" wherein the Commander has sex with Offred while Offred lies in the Commander's wife's lap (yep—that adds a whole new dimension to the idea of a threesome) made my stomach turn.

I find the societal implications also interesting, as well as the exploration of the underground resistance movement. If I hadn't gotten it for less than a dollar, I'm not sure I would have read it. I do find it fascinating how understated the horror of the book is. I think it's intended to indicate the result of indoctrination. Much of the writing is simply observational, without commentary on how horrible their lives all are. It's at least effective in that respect.

The novel ends ambiguously, which was fine for me. I would imagine those who favor neat tidy Victorian endings with the bad guys punished and the good guys avenged will hate the ending. The ending does give some hope for humanity without seeming phony, which I did appreciate.

I'd say read it if you get around to it. Thus, I'm giving it 3 stars under Meg's rating scale. I wouldn't enthusiastically recommend it, nor discourage anyone from reading it. The Handmaid's Tale is certainly thought-provoking and reasonably well-written. It's a quick read and for all its unpleasantness, I wanted to find out what happens. That's more than I can say for a few books I tried to read last year.