Breed, God Damit! Just Breed Woman! (Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood)

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Product:	Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Date:	22/06/02 (2616 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well written, thought provoking

Disadvantages: Ninteen Eighty Four all over again, with no acknowledgemet by the author to this fact, why re-write an almost perfect book

"And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die." The first paragraph of Genesis, 30:1-3 and how Atwood, begins her most famous of books, The Handmaid's Tale. Booker Prize nominated and winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and the Governor's Generals Award, hardly high profile awards but The Handmaid's Tale has gone on to be a set text in many A level syllabus and was of all the "great" books that I haven't read, the most recommended to me.

The quotation from Genesis, sums the book up - in a futuristic landscape, where human meddling with the environment has caused parts of America to be uninhabitable; women to suffer fertility problems and people to become disenchanted with the consumerist and money driven nature of everything - the traditional American Christian church has formed the Republic of Gilead. Taking over the majority of the American states, with a totalitarian and medieval regime. Atwood in this fictional landscape focuses on a woman, "Offred" (although her real name has been denied to her); she has but one function in this new order, to breed. If she fails to breed she will be sent to the wastelands, where she will be poisoned by radiation and all things foul previously released by democratic America. "Give me children or else, I die". What a wonderfully literal interpretation of the bible that is. In Gilead, conception and children are the most valuable commodities around - however, defective children are disposed of, like garbage and the poor mother is deemed to have sinned against the church and can expect little reward other than pariah status and maybe those wasteland colonies. A fine lot of forgiveness there then.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has taken, the destruction wrought on the globe by modern society and the changing roles of the sexes and form
ed a frightening conclusion. Western society has nowhere to go, except to another form of totalitarianism - except this time it is the Church that springs into the role of oppressive dictator, the Church with its doom filled prophecies and notion of sin. The Church takes away the populations' liberty; freedom of thought and expression with the ideology that if it doesn't act in such a way the human race will eventually extinguish itself. Who knows, whether it will prove a terrifying reality that we will get ourselves into such a mess and who knows whether such a punishing end justifies the means? But the vision painted by Atwood, is certainly not too far fetched.

Atwood has taken the Nineteen Eighty Four approach in conveying the damage that any totalitarian ideology does to the human spirit. The Handmaid's Tale in the same manner as Nineteen Eighty Four takes the personal approach. It focuses on one person "Offred" and shows how totalitarianism impacts at an individual, rather than state level. You are never sure in the book, what is going on outside Gilead, the reader is told all that "Offred" is fed by the Gilead propaganda machine. The reader knows not who or what is in control, or pulling the strings, but they feel the effect - the sapping of morale; and the paranoia of doing or saying the wrong thing through "Offred", as in Nineteen Eighty Four, you feel all this through Winston.

Furthermore, in The Handmaid's Tale, redemption of spirit and resistance to the totalitarian masters, the spies, the informants and the all-pervading suffocation of people is carried out and demonstrated through love - the one simple act that is illegal to Winston in Nineteen Eighty Four, is illegal to "Offred", but still she wants it as Winston does and so in Atwood's totalitarian vision the human spirit is seen as unbreakable as Orwell expressed some forty years previously.

The Handmaid&#
39;s Tale is written from and in a certain regard for, the female perspective, what is it that makes women tick? (At this moment, I expect that all men are simply shrugging their shoulders!) The importance of love and children to a woman, are emphasised, "Offred" in flash backs reflects back on how much her child meant to her; how wonderful it felt to be in love; and how people never know how lucky they really are in a situation. Atwood is certainly not saying that women should stay at home, be good little housewives and have babies; she is expressing the need for choice, for society not to judge either way and perhaps in a real icky Hollywood way, Atwood forms the view that it is love that makes the world tick. Of course as in any totalitarian regime that has actually been in our history, Gilead fails to stop any human being truly falling under its spell, by its own repression - just as in NAZI Germany and Stalinist Russia, the people at the top fail to practice what they preach and come across as hypocrites and this adds a real echo of history to the novel.

As with all of Atwood's books, The Handmaid's Tale is supremely easy to read, the novel flows and it is easy for the reader to imagine himself or herself as "Offred" in Gilead. Gilead itself is bought to life with real vigour and bleakness, with frightening brutality; to me the vision created is one that is eminently possible. This is not purely a "straight" book, Atwood has a sharp and sometimes cynical wit and this is displayed in full force in a very dark kind of way, but it does make you smile, even though you really shouldn't.

I enjoyed this read, it made me think about how selfish our generation is; it made me realise that everybody always thinks that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; and it drew me into the murky and medieval world of Gilead. However, as indicated this book is not original, it is Orwell's visi
on of totalitarianism with a slight twist, at times "Offred" could be "Winston" and you wouldn't know which book you were reading. Whilst it is not a crime to be inspired by a previous novel and to take ideas from it, it is a shame when the later book, seems to find it very hard to find its own voice and place. The Handmaid's Tale at its worse is simply Nineteen Eighty Four, written in the female voice - there are differences, and of course we have seen that totalitarian regimes all end up looking very similar no matter what the ideology is that sparks them off, but there are any number of ways to write about such a regime, not just the superb way that Orwell did. Not only this, but The Handmaid's Tale builds up the tension, the will she or won't she and then just ends, in a sharp and unsatisfactory fashion. Both of these detractions do not make The Handmaid's tale a bad book, but the first is always the original and the more striking and simply The Handmaid's Tale is not a patch on Nineteen Eighty Four. I still recommend this read, Atwood, writes in such a beautiful manner and provides such a pertinent warning to the complacent Western Democracies that the book, to some extent, deserves its place among the modern classics and it is a much better read than Atwood's recent Booker winner, The Blind Assassin, but, this is not an original read and does not really add a great deal more to Nineteen Eighty Four in message, about the dangers and horrors of totalitarianism.

Published by Vintage.

ISBN - 0-09-974091-5.

Priced £6.99 and 324 pages long.

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