The Handmaid's Tale

I read Handmaid for my Women of Genre Fiction challenge. It was made up of very different halves. The first section, telling us of Offred's confined life as a handmaid, explaining how it came about, was excellent. You really felt sympathy for her horrific position. The sensuous descriptions of the minutiae that were all Offred had to focus on in her boredom were wonderful, her past was poignantand heartbreaking. But later when the book widened out to show other characters and plot developments, I found it less interesting, even unconvincing, with contrived plot items.

I had several reservations. Said plot developments, of course, but as a science fiction reader, the book was irritating. I do realize Atwood didn't know anything about SF, and was using SF trappings to get across her points about the fears she had about the growing backlash against feminism by the Neanderthals in the 80s. Indeed the situation is pretty much the same today. I did feel she was using a scattergun effect, tarring all men as evil, as it were, and would have had a stronger book if she had been more focused.

I found the whole way she found her old rebellious friend again, in a brothel no less, very unconvincing, as was the slight love affair with the chauffeur.

If the book had ended with the escape I would have been really disatisfied, but I found the epilogue, with the academic lecture on Offred's tapes a masterstroke. Right to the end there is no info on Offred, just a academic speculation on which of three Freds was the right one. Offred herself was ignored, and disappears into history unknown and still an appendage. That was a good stroke.

Its not new to use the SF field as a frame for getting social ideas across. Some of the most famous books in the SF field were produced with such an agenda. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 even Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five are not real SF in the meaning of science fiction, but SF in the meaning of speculative fiction.

For me the book hovered between the two, neither one or the other fully. Most science fiction fans would probably be like me, irritated that this odd world is just plonked down with no antecedents, no connections with the past, or to real life. I assume this was because of her inexperience in the form.

To me Atwood is one of those dry writers. I find Ursula LeGuin a bit similar in that respect.

But it did have some intriguing ideas, and was food for thought, but didn't touch my heart