The Handmaid's Tale

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In what used to be the United States of America rises a totalitarian state named Gilead, where women garbed in red known as Handmaids are assigned in rotation as birth vessels to men of power known as Commanders. Their role is simple: to serve the biological purpose of reproduction, after an unmentioned phenomenon leaves much of the country with fatal levels of infertility. One such Handmaid only referred to as Offred, based on a genitive naming system after the names of their Commanders who serve as their owners, tells the story of her everyday life and routine, how she discovers an underground resistance group known as Mayday, and how both her Commander and his Wife make her complicit in their various secret schemes that neither must be aware of. In a new world order where the only purpose of a fertile woman is to give birth, Offred tries to reconcile her current situation with fleeting memories of the past, her partner and daughter, and hopes that she might be reunited with them again one day.

Much of the novel’s 300+ pages are firsthand narrations of Offred’s life as a handmaid, a slice-of-life account of her daily duties interspersed with disjointed memories of her past life before the incorporation of Gilead. Plot development is slow and your knowledge of this universe is restricted by the POV of your anchor in the story who is also just collecting bits and pieces of info here and there. The ambiguous cliffhanger ending serves as the climax while the 12-page epilogue is a university symposium set in the year 2195 long after Gilead collapses, almost two centuries after the time when the events described by the narrator took place.

The epilogue at least gives us as much. It is revealed that the story is derived from a collection of thirty recorded cassette tapes recovered in the city of Bangor in modern-day Maine, which is part of Gilead in the book’s world, bordering Canada, where most refugees escape to. The real identities of the characters are speculated upon but reach no definite conclusion. The fate of Offred is also left undefined, but the beauty in this is how it mirrors real life diaries or recordings containing first hand narrations of historical accounts, which serve more as a rather personal peek into the psyche of the individual living in that era than a tell-all record of historical facts.

The appeal of the book has much to do with the absurdity of the premise given its setting in the Land of the Free vis-à-vis the likelihood of it actually happening. The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1986. Fast forward just four decades later and we see an America that has been on an aggressive seesaw of liberal and conservative ideologies, dynamics constantly shifting as if repeatedly testing the limits of democracy. Perhaps that’s where the thrill of this book’s premise really lies because we can never be so sure, but the United States of America always seems to be just one election away from becoming the Republic of Gilead.

This is my second Margaret Atwood novel, my first being her Booker Prize winning The Blind Assassin published two decades after The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood has a legit talent for storytelling. She has a way of writing characters that just draw you in, making you stop and look at the realities they inhabit. The Handmaid’s Tale is more political in nature, though. While societal norms and reputation play a big role in both books, The Handmaid’s Tale just feels like the beginning of a much larger franchise in the same vein as those young adult fiction series where an underdog stands up against a dystopian system, against all odds.

And that might explain why there is just a feeling of being shortchanged once you finally put the book down because you want more. There are just too many questions for which you will have no answers. Instead of getting the bigger picture and reaching a cathartic conclusion where the “good guys” prevail, The Handmaid’s Tale just offers an individual account of one character who does not really make much of a difference. Of course we know that Gilead eventually ceases to exist, but that is added as a simple footnote instead of making up the novel’s entire plot.

If anything, The Handmaid's Tale is just one of many novels that exist to remind us how some freedoms we currently enjoy that generations before us fought hard for could be snatched away in a snap by a mere regime change. The prospect is scary, but doesn't make it any less true, or out of reach as far as possibilities are concerned.