I have ambivalent feelings toward Margaret Atwood. I read several of her books when I was younger and enjoyed them. Then I moved to Toronto and studied at Atwood’s alma mater and decided (not entirely fairly) that she was too uptight and her prose is dull and she only writes about a very narrow swath of boring people in a city full of interesting ones. (And she dismisses science fiction as all being about interstellar cephalopods.)
The problem with Atwood is that Canadian Literature, as an academic field, is big on her sort of thing, at the expense of other writers.
But then there’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which, set in a dystopian Boston, was a welcome change from her other books. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when fundamentalists of any type take control.
It’s a classic and a staple of many literature classes, and deservedly so. A few years after extremists (in this case, far-right-wing Christians) have taken control of the United States and turned it into a theocratic nightmare, Offred (Fred’s handmaid—her real name is never mentioned) is pushed into service as a handmaid for a powerful family. Her main duties are running errands and more importantly, producing a baby for the family to raise.
The biggest problem with this book is that the characters aren’t fully developed. The reader gets some insights into Offred’s past, but a lot of it seems to have been forgotten. This is effective, because it shows how the government has managed to repress even a strong woman like her. But the other characters show no real personalities. Offred’s master and mistress, who have more freedom to do what they want, are dense and unpredictable.
But even in Offred’s memories, characters like her husband, Luke, and her mother seem empty. Her mother is the worst—she’s almost a caricature of a 1970s second-wave feminist, with views so extreme she almost comes across as a parody. It was a sour note in what is otherwise a very good, very feminist book.
