“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
When it comes to our book reviews, we here at What We Reading haven’t always given the most classic novels all the time and appreciation they deserve. Ignorantly, we’ve always wondered how much value there is in reading stories that are so well-known, interpreted and analysed. Rest assured, we’re working on fixing that. Fuelled by our recent binges of post-apocalyptic, dystopian and generally eerie stories, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and pay homage to one of the most lauded and impactful dystopia books of all time, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But, did this powerful feminist warning of the future live up to the hype? Join us for our The Handmaid’s Tale book review to find out!
Date Published: 1985
Author: Margaret Atwood
Genre: Dystopia, Science-Fiction
Pages: 311
Goodreads Rating: 4.14/5
Premise
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. Once a day, she is permitted to leave the house of the Commander and his wife where she lives to pick up groceries. The shops no longer have words on them because women are no longer allowed to read. Once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant. In this future of declining birth rates, women like Offred and her viable ovaries are essential commodities. Yet Offred can also remember a time before, a time when she had a job, her own money, access to knowledge and a family that she was able to love and support.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a story told through the lens of Offred about her struggle to survive whilst retaining some semblance of her identity in a near-future patriarchal, totalitarian and fundamentalist regime.
What Worked
Off the bat, it’s so clear why The Handmaid’s Tale is considered one of the most defining dystopia novels of all time alongside the likes of 1984 and Brave New World. Even dystopian books that are decades old still have the capability to appear timely and relevant in today’s world, and that is certainly the case with Atwood’s tale. The setting of Gilead and its practices are all eerily plausible and everything from the roles which both the men and women play, to the oppressive, intellectual and spiritual means by which society is controlled serve as a chilling warning about the dangers of complicity and the loss of individuality.
With so many issues around the suppression of women’s rights and agency resurfacing across the world today, a book like The Handmaid’s Tale appears more cognisant than ever.
Atwood’s prose gives the book a poetic, almost ethereal feel that works well as Offred narrates the story. There’s a whimsical nature to the way in which she bounces between the events in the present and memories she recounts from either before the collapse of society or during her training as a Handmaid. It works to hammer home the book’s core themes and delivers a genuinely chilling and paranoia-fuelled note to a number of sequences. These firmly evoke the deadening effect that the loss of sexual desire and free will has on both an individual and society as a whole.
Finally, what also helps make The Handmaid’s Tale appear so hauntingly plausible are the comparisons to real-world events a reader naturally makes when they go through. Atwood herself has claimed every aspect of the Republic of Gilead was based on something that has either happened or is happening, and the influences of everything from the Cold War to Puritanism shine through to make Atwood’s worldbuilding even more immersive.
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What Didn’t
Pointing out criticisms for books like The Handmaid’s Tale that are so revered is always a risky game, and there are genuinely very few aspects about the book that we didn’t enjoy. With that being said, no book is perfect.
First, it can take some time to adjust to Atwood’s delivery. Quotation marks and other forms of punctuation aren’t used, which can make following along with who is saying what and when somewhat jarring. It also isn’t always clear when certain scenes are occurring. You tend to get a better grip on these things by the second half of the book; nevertheless, it did make the first few chapters a slight slog for us at times.
Secondly, whilst the immediate world of The Handmaid’s Tale is well-fleshed out, there are some broader aspects of the story that could potentially have been tightened up.
An example of this is the pacing in which society apparently crumbles and this totalitarian regime is established; how a fundamentalist group is able to kill the President and suppress all women’s rights in mere weeks does seem a little on the unbelievable side. Hints of a wider conflict and a ravaged nation beyond Offred’s town are also hinted at but don’t particularly go anywhere.
Finally, it would have been interesting for Atwood to address the inevitable complexities the Republic of Gilead would have had with sexual orientations and racial identities. Again, these are dismissed as being against the law and at odds with the new social order. However, very little is done to acknowledge how and where they will continue to exist, which is a shame.
Verdict
Overall, The Handmaid’s Tale is undoubtedly worth the hype and studying it commands today. In a world where rights and freedoms are constantly under threat by those with power and the ability to exert control, the hellish anti-utopia of Gilead should always serve as a reminder of what we stand to lose by standing by and letting it happen.
Atwood’s worldbuilding is masterfully constructed on the whole and evokes a constant sense of paranoia and dread that manages to sell even something as straightforward as collecting vegetables into a potential permanent life-or-death scenario. Her prose and poetic style provide a perfect lens through which readers can feel Offred’s despair, and the ominous ending gives readers a fitting tragic-feeling finale.
Our Rating: 5/5
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
