Kevin Ansbro's Reviews > The Handmaid’s Tale

"Nolite te bastardes carborundum."
(Don't let the bastards grind you down.)

Because so many of my esteemed Goodreads friends have sung in praise of this novel, I felt that I was destined to join their burgeoning ranks. Instead, I was left scratching my head, wondering if I'd even read the same book!

I was that rarity - an Atwood virgin - and I was knee-tremblingly keen to pop my cherry. I would love to say that I was enthralled and that I am now a fan, but I can't. I simply can't.
I'm not a polemicist; it pains me to do this but, aaaghh, I shall be putting my head above the parapet.

First, the positives:
The concept is venerable, following the tradition of dystopian classics, such as Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.
This is a cautionary tale of what *might* happen were we to ignore the erosion of democratic and social freedoms, thereby enabling a right-wing Christian theocracy to take over.
The author perfectly captures the resigned bleakness of such a subjugated existence.
There were instances of genius and some moments where I could clearly see certain scenes playing out in the cinema of my mind (the illicit Scrabble games, for example).

Now, the negatives:
(Apologies to all you Atwood fans; I am actually cringing as I type this).
My read got off to an inauspicious start.
Almost immediately, I encountered a post-modernist (imagine me doing air quotes) sentence that was so-o long it straddled different time zones.
Here it is:
>>A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.<<

So, please convince me, Atwood fans. Tell me honestly that this is not a clumsily-written sentence. And there are ten commas, for crying out loud! TEN. Count them!
If you arranged the little buggers together in a line, you could almost simulate the legs of a millipede!

I'm clearly of the opinion that metafiction belongs in the same orbit as conceptual art, along with the collective denial that causes people to gush over the aesthetic beauty of a pile of bricks in an art gallery. Go to a building site, I say. There's no entrance fee! : )

I so wanted to like this book. I would have loved to join the legion of Atwood devotees and be here, right now, singing her praises.
But, for me, her dictation prose is perfunctory, the similes are decidedly clunky, the syntax is dissonant, and the story just plodded along like an emphysemic tortoise. Were it not for the endorsements of my Goodreads friends rattling about in my mind, I would have abandoned it.

Despite its Chaucerian title, the book is set in an unspecified future where America has been hijacked by Christian Fundamentalists who treat enslaved fertile women as wombs on legs (an Old Testament-style version of the Taliban, I guess).
It's told in the first-person narrative, from the POV of Offred, one such fem-slave, whose sole purpose in life is to endure loveless copulation in the hope of successful fertilisation.
She remembers life before servitude and secretly wishes to be valued. "It's only the insides of our bodies that are important."

It gives me no pleasure to write this; I fully realise that I am swimming against the tide of popular opinion here. I feel like the mutinous child in Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes.
I know Margaret Atwood to be a kind, thoughtful and altruistic lady; her book is prescient and has topical relevance, but so does 1984 and Brave New World. Each is far better (in my humble opinion).

I am so sorry, Atwood addicts.
I must be missing something.

It's not you, dahhlings, it's me.