Of all the freedoms that human civilization has conceived, popularized and distributed throughout most of the world, those of the individual are of paramount importance. For though the powerful have always held largely unassailable positions, Olympian heights from which to judge and manipulate those less fortunate than they, the powerless have not. In times past, this uneven application of laws and privileges was justified by any number of self-serving notions such as Divine Right and Might makes Right. But thanks to both the Rule of Law and to those numerous champions of democratic freedoms, some of us now enjoy societies in which the homeless are sheltered by the same laws as the elites.
For some of us, these societies have nurtured us for the totality of our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But for others, these societies are but a dream, a fanciful theory of equality that may or may not ever come. For them, the present is defined by the rulers, for the rulers leaving the many to be merely pawns for their pleasure. This world Margaret Atwood vividly animates in her chilling, award-winning novel.
In the near future, the celebrated nation once known as the United States has given way to revolution. A dominionist organization calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, guided and inspired by the Old Testament, has orchestrated a devastating terrorist attack upon the seat of national government, wiping out most of the executive and legislative branches. Blaming the attack on Islamic terrorists, the Sons erect a military junta in the power vacuum created by the Republic's fall, a junta that proceeds to implement the Sons' particularly stringent form of Christian fundamentalism throughout what will henceforth be called the Republic of Gilead.
In the wake of these shocking developments, the rights of women and minorities begin to rapidly disappear. Jews are given a choice between conversion to Christianity or forced relocation to Israel. African Americans are reclassified as the Children of Hamm and deployed as plantation-style labor. Gay people are ordered to reconsider their sexual orientation or face lethal consequences. But for all of these dark developments, perhaps the worst plight is reserved for women who are forbidden to work, to read, and virtually to think for themselves. They are reduced to incubators for the next generation of Gileadians, with the most fortunate of them placed as wives to defenders of the state and the least exiled to work the vast, radioactive zones that occupy the outskirts of the republic.
Within this narrow, colorless world, Offred endures. A handmaid, or concubine, within the house of one of the regime's elites, she barely remembers her previous life as an American who worked, played, had friends, went out to parties. Her husband is gone and her daughter seized by the state for indoctrination. But worst is perhaps Offred's own re-education at the hands of a special segment of Gilead women who have been privileged to re-train society's women to obey, to please and, most importantly, to be fertile for their masters. Despite her many sorrows, Offred persists until her owner picks her out of the crowd of handmaid's, starting a series of events that will thrust her into an uncertain future.
As grim as it is introspective, The Handmaid's Tale is imaginative, dystopian fiction. The award-winning product of one of Canada's most famous authors, it posits a future America in the grips of a perverse fundamentalism that has seized upon America's ills as an excuse to carry out mass-slaughter and the mass-reorganization of society along patriarchal lines. In this, the work, originally published in 1985, is very much of its time. For these are concerns specific to the 1980s in which a succession of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had encouraged, rather than choked off, the meteoric rise of those potent strains of American teleevangelism that would, in response to the liberalization of society in the 1960s and early 1970s, eventually coalesce into the Religious Right. This, combined with the dissipation of Women's Lib, which had already begun to devolve into various and somewhat competitive waves of feminism, created fertile ground for the imagination of an author and a possible, if not probable, future.
Consequently, though The Handmaid's Tale is chilling, its anachronism robs it of some of its power. We live, now, in an age in which threats emanate from the abuse of technology, not the distortion of faith. We live in a time in which the surveillance state is the dystopian boogeyman, not dominionism which is given about as much heed as Neo-Nazism. The idea that generals and scientists, market researchers and corporate executives would get together to create a new society in which they restricted their own behavior, in the misguided belief that they were executing God's will, seems silly from the hindsight of 2013 in which the heat has gone out of the culture wars and in which the freedoms of the individual are, if not expanding, then certainly static.
That said, The Handmaid's Tale is nonetheless a forceful illustration of the immense power of totalitarianism. Re-education has managed not only to turn women upon one another, distracting them from the greater goal of overthrowing their oppressors, it has succeeded in changing their norms, in convincing them that what they enjoyed before was wrong, sinful. This kind of behavioral conditioning is not only possible -- see North Korea --, it is terrifying. Ms. Atwood most convincingly demonstrates this power in the form of Moira, Offred's coarse, boisterous and combative best friend who, instead of being hardened into an opponent of the regime, is shattered by its oppressive practices. In this, Ms. Atwood leaves no doubt of totalitarianism's power, nor its willingness to use it, a demonstration that provides the novel with its best moments.
Moreover, Ms. Atwood's decision to make Offred her heroine is brilliant. For Offred is not a hero. She is not a survivor. She's not even especially interesting, or smart, or earnest. She does not stand on rooftops, calling out for change. She is gray, a plain, colorless canvas upon which the Republic of Gilead can scrawl out their beliefs. She is painfully and tragically average, just like most of us who will read her story. She is us in less fortunate circumstances.
For readers even passingly familiar with technological and societal trends, dated and even at times humorous. But for those even mildly interested in societies that care nothing for the rights of the individual, quietly gripping. (3/5 Stars)
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