Reading: The Handmaid's Tale

[white_hart]

I don't think I've re-read The Handmaid's Tale since I was at university; I recall trying to re-read it then because I was writing an essay on it and finding bits of it so upsetting I struggled to get through it, and while I've occasionally looked up references I haven't tried to re-read it since. (I also haven't watched the TV series, because I definitely didn't think I could handle that.) However, I do want to read The Testaments, and given how long it has been I thought I should probably refresh my memory of The Handmaid's Tale first, so I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked my copy (second-hand when I bought it, well-read and still bearing the stains of a 25-year-old banana-in-bag incident) off the shelf for a re-read.

I was surprised at just how much I'd forgotten; some scenes I still remembered vividly, but others I had no recollection of at all (I only remembered the narrator's attempted flight with her husband and child from the 1990 film, and not from the book, and I'd forgotten most of her best friend Moira's story and a lot of the domestic details of life in Gilead which show the universality of oppression). If anything, it hits harder now than it did then; partly because the world (or at least the Western world) has got so much grimmer and less optimistic in recent years, partly because in addition to this I'm now so much more aware of the real-world antecedents of Gilead (as Atwood says, there is nothing in the novel that hadn't already happened, somewhere in the world, when she wrote the novel, but I didn't know much about those at 18 or 20 and read it as pure fiction), and partly simply because I was a rather emotionally immature 18- or 20-year-old and didn't have the same capacity to empathise with other people - not just the narrator, but so many of the other characters who we only see through her eyes - that I do at 45. I found it a really tough read, but it is also still an amazing book; Atwood is an incredible writer, and I think this may be her masterpiece. It's a vivid, compelling and utterly chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Despite being over 30 years old now, it still feels very contemporary, with the exception of the concern about falling birthrates which is definitely of its time. I'm a bit sorry I left it this long to revisit it, although I certainly need to read at least a couple of much lighter, fluffier books before I venture on to try The Testaments.

Comments

[conuly]

Birthrates really ARE falling worldwide, especially in industrialized nations. This is probably due to personal choice more than anything, but some nations facing the steepest drops are trying to encourage more people to give birth. The other way they could rebuild their population would be to encourage immigration and take in more refugees, which is one of the reasons the far right is so fucking tediously obnoxious on the subject of immigration.

[white_hart]

True, but I don't think the concern about "infertility epidemics" that comes through in The Handmaid's Tale and some other books of the same time (such as Children of Men) is still so much of a thing, is it?

[cmcmck]

Never read it largely because I felt I would find it way too disturbing for a quiet mind.

[white_hart]

It is certainly very disturbing.

[callmemadam]

I've never been able to bring myself to read this, however important it is.

On falling birthrates, Putin has used this as an excuse to crack down on homosexuality.

[white_hart]

I first read it long before I'd even considered the possibility that books might be that upsetting!

It's less the use of the idea of falling birthrates as a tool for social control, and more that even in the pre-Gilead society there's a recognition of fertility crisis, and a suggestion that that was a looming demographic problem readers would be aware of at the time when the book was written, whereas now I think overpopulation seems like more of a worry.

[antisoppist]

I haven't re-read it in about twenty years either but I did watch the TV series. I feel the same about having read it as dystopian futurisitic SF on an alternate timeline when I was in my twenties and now, thanks to world events and my own experiences, finding it far more realistic.

I didn't watch the second TV series because I didn't think I could cope with more but I have it recorded. At the moment I am listening to The Testaments as Radio 4's book at bedtime and I now want to watch the second TV series after that once I've had the authorial version.

[white_hart]

I gather that the TV series and The Testaments are actually very different. (I'm not sure how I feel about the adaptation continuing the story after the end of the original novel - The Handmaid's Tale is so perfectly crafted, and it kind of feels like continuing it lessens its impact and turns it into just another TV show.)

[antisoppist]

That was my feeling about it. It felt like the second TV series was cashing in on the success of the first one, which was based on the book. And by all accounts it was even grimmer. But I would now be interested to see what they did with it once I've heard The Testaments. Of course I don't know how good the radio adaptation is compared with the book either.

[white_hart]

I think they do abridge for Book at Bedtime, but they don't actually change things, so it's probably pretty close.

[lilliburlero]

I watched the TV series but it lost my interest where it departed from Atwood's worldbuilding and turned into a more conventional one-woman-against-the-system adventure story. And while I appreciated the producers' desire to include people of colour in the cast, it served to de-emphasise the extent to which Gilead is a white supremacist nation, with racism and misogyny mutually reinforcing one another. FWIW, I think the infertility dystopias of the later 20th century and today's racist narrative of overpopulation are very much two sides of the same coin, and the TV series missed a trick in not exploring that.

[white_hart]

Yes, I can see why they'd want to have characters of colour but I think the forcible relocation of anyone not white is a really important part of the regime in the book.

[perennialanna]

My mother says The Testaments is (relatively) quite a bit lighter.

She also says that I will pick up many more of the literary allusions than she did, because I am so much wider-read. I nearly dropped my coffee mug at that comment, because it has been written in stone these 25 years that she has read more and knows more about All Literature than I ever will so I must not have opinions on books, especially if they differ from her opinions.

I haven't dared re-read The Handmaid's Tale, so am unprepared for The Testaments.

[white_hart]

Yes, I’d heard that The Testaments was lighter - I think if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be planning to read it, even though I am going to see Atwood talking about it at the end of October.