A Hand-Made Tale

If, a couple of years ago, you’d have asked me to read a novel that ‘illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex,’ I probably would have told you where to put said novel. Fortunately, times have changed. And, in tandem with this process of enlightenment, I got hold of a copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for free...

 

In the near future, fertility is the overriding concern of human society. Mass chemical leaks have caused widespread sterility, and women are empty vessels, valued only for their reproductive potential. Those who cannot yield are banished, they are Unwomen, and in the patriarchal fascism of the Republic of Gilead a failure in fecundity is always the fault of the woman. Sterile men do not exist. The eponymous handmaid, Offred, recalls her past life and her past lover against the stifling backdrop of this new society.

 

Atwood’s prose is acutely poetic, and it is no surprise that she has also published volumes of poetry. She clearly has a deep interest in words, their sounds and connotations as well as straightforward meanings, and this comes through very strongly. There is a pleasing sense that her words really are meticulously chosen. ‘I feel like the word shatter,’ Offred thinks to herself. The words she finds scratched inside the wardrobe in her room become totemic, and complex memories and streams of thought are evoked by casual words repeated, echoed, distorted. The process of wordplay vividly displays the layers of consciousness of someone caught between a happy past and a bleak present.

 

It is these small details that I’m enjoying most about The Handmaid’s Tale. The grocery shops are called things like All Flesh and Daily Bread, and this again gives the reader a point of contact with our own world. Just as Offred seizes on a word and it becomes evocative of her past, so we can seize on these names and know that organised religion and male dominance are virtually inseparable in Atwood’s crosshairs. As always, it is the recognisable elements of our own society that are the most frightening.

 

Atwood also evokes the worst of our society’s past as well as its present. There are high walls and public penalties for political dissidence which bring to mind the very worst that the twentieth century had to offer in Europe. There are also the barren Colonies, reminiscent of the wasted, sterilised Africa in The Man in the High Castle, which condemn imperialism and colonisation, so often perceived as masculine instincts. 

 

I once read an article exploring the sexual side of colonialism, and it was one of the worst piles of tripe I’ve ever waded through. Something about King Arthur slaying giants with the phallus of his sword. Obviously, Atwood is vastly more subtle than this. She has issues with modern, masculine society, but they are expressed in such a way that you can almost take them or leave them. I don't think this is a bad thing. The book may be intended to make a point, but my experience of it was more poetic than political.