We need to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale.

 

My professor in undergrad recommended this book to me. In my memory, she put down my 40-page manuscript, bleeding red with her notes, and sighed.

“Something very basic is off—your dialogue is wrong. Your tenses shift,” she said.  Then she told me to read Margaret Atwood. I bought The Handmaid’s Tale and ate it in days, so quickly I didn’t absorb what I needed. The story was just too good; I needed to get to the end.

Five years passed.

The Netflix show came out.

I hadn’t finished my manuscript.

It became clear that if I were ever going to write my novel or watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, I’d have to really read this book. And write a review.

All of the buzz I’ve heard surrounding the television show always involves the story-line. And why wouldn’t it? A shockingly well-formulated dystopian society that addresses troubling misogynistic realities within our own present-day society is enthralling to look into. To “what-if” until you convince yourself that it could happen tomorrow. To highlight, even further, the injustices we live with today. We like to watch train-wrecks, collapse and catastrophe—even more when they seem to be speeding towards us. Thanks, Margaret.

This is a great time to note that The Handmaid’s Tale was written in the 1980s.

But before we get into the plot, I have to touch on Atwood’s writing. I mentioned, briefly, in embarrassment, the comment my professor made on my tenses issue. It’s easy for me to slip in and out of tenses—a curse, actually. Lets call it a talent, which also happens to be a flaw. In this novel, Atwood manages to seamlessly slip between past and present—when society was normal and then when everything was changed.

How.

How does the story move so fluidly? One second our urgent need to know what exactly “The Ceremony” entails is undercut by a quick immersive flashback…then flows back to the present.

Formatting helps. And the novel reads vaguely stream-of-consciousness. Stay with me now, I’ll explain:

Offred, our protagonist, bounces around her story, sometimes shying away from especially painful flashbacks. Other times, she has no choice but to face them when something in the dystopian present reminds her of the past. It explains the flow and makes her human. It reaffirms that we, as readers, exist in her sometimes delicate, often distracted human mind.

But this isn’t a present tense with blind corners. She’s retrospective in a way that’s impossible in a true progressive present tense. It would be a journal, I think, but she’s not allowed to read and write. So it’s her own way of recounting her experiences as they happened.

Another note on Margaret Atwood’s writing: It’s Poetic. I found this in every line I underlined and, occasionally, in interesting formatting that read more like poetry than prose.

This is true of Atwood’s writing style, in general. I’m no Atwood expert or well-read fan (yet). But I did listen to A. M. Homes read Atwood’s darkly poetic (and oddly funny) short story Stone Mattress on The New Yorker’s podcast. And, stumbling through Foyles Bookstore today in London (Did I mention I’m in London? I’m in London.) I came across a collection of Atwood’s poetry. I didn’t know she wrote poetry. It all makes sense now.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s writing is poetic as she…

Plays with words [P.212]:

“Soothing to the eye, the eyes, the Eyes, for that’s who this show is for.”

Questions motives [P.155]:

“As a request it was opaque.”

Makes the intangible, tangible [P.126]:

“Envy radiates from them, I can smell it, faint wisps of acid, mingled with their perfume.”

 

Poetic.

One final note on Atwood’s writing deals with dialogue. In the past tense, the dialogue isn’t punctuated. I like this. I envy this skill of writers—to write clear dialogue without huge punctuation screaming, “someone is talking now” is a talent. Not overly difficult to do, but pleasant and easy to appreciate.

Lets proceed to the plot.

Take a momentary reading break to imagine me staring at a wall for five minutes asking myself how I can sum this up.

The Handmaid’s Tale is something all women carry in the back of our heads when we think of the past, the present, and the future. It’s a cautionary tale backed by indirect historical elements. It’s the story of what happens when everything goes wrong for women all at once.

Basic freedoms, body autonomy, and individuality are replaced with a hideously patriarchal society where tyrannical laws, backed by scripture, create an unrealistically conservative society. The story takes place a few years after the government takeover, so the old freedoms are still fresh in everyone’s minds. Rebels are still fighting the new government—spies and violence and paranoia abound.

It makes sense that Margaret Atwood wrote this in and around West Germany in the early 80s.

Things aren’t great for all of the men, but they aren’t as bad as they are for women. Sounds familiar to me, a black woman. Hi.

I don’t have much else to say about the plot. It’s dystopian and original, relevant and personal. I want to write stories like this, where the category/genre list looks hectic: Fiction, Political, Feminist, Fantasy. Where believable, factually dense worlds are created with scraps of ours. I want to suck in readers, take them far away, and spit them out… only to realize that they’d barely gone anywhere.

These are some of the things Margaret Atwood does well.

Five Stars.