About this title: In this futuristic fantasy, the Republic of Gilead--formerly the United States--is a fundamentalist regime that has reduced women to a state of servitude and suppressed all civil rights. The protagonist, a woman called Offred, becomes the Handmaid of the Commander, expected to bear him a child in exchange for her freedom. Old enough to remember life before the revolution, Offred resists the new order and becomes involved in an underground resistance movement. Atwood's novel was a best seller and became the basis for a popular movie.
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Fawcett
Date Published: 1986
ISBN-13:9780449212608ISBN:0449212602
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"This was the first book I read after joining a book club. It was WAY outside of my comfy box of Dan Brown & Harry Potter. This book really made me THINK for a change. I thought about concepts that I had never imagined possible before!! Scary - life changing concepts about how easily it would be for my money and freedom to be taken away. It's been 3 years since I read this book - and I STILL think about the ideas I was introduced to regularly. Excellent read. Great for broadening ideas about life. Great for book club discussions."
"The scariest thing about Atwood's dystopian fantasy, first published in 1985, is how prophetic it seems. There were references in the book which sent a chill of recognition down my spine. A right-wing government which blames Islamic fundamentalists for terrorist attacks and begins to suspend certain human rights, claiming it is doing so to protect the people from heathen bastards? I daresay it will sound familiar to any left-wing American who has ever looked with a wary eye at the country's increasingly influential religious right. Nuclear disasters which affect health and fertility? I know some Ukrainian women who could tell a few nasty stories about that. And of course the suppression of women which is the main subject of The Handmaid's Tale is only too real in places like Iran and Afghanistan, where many women are probably worse off than Atwood's protagonist, Offred.
So, yes, the novel rang true to me. I've read reviews by people who said their appreciation of the book was significantly undermined by the unlikeliness of the premise, but it didn't seem that far-fetched to me. I don't think a society like the one Atwood describes in The Handmaid's Tale would necessarily exist for a long time, but then regimes don't have to last long to cause untold damage. Just look at the havoc Nazi Germany wreaked in just over a decade, or Mao's Red Guards in Cultural Revolution-era China...
I found The Handmaid's Tale a compelling book, and not just for its powerful vision of a dystopian future. Sure, it has a cold, impersonal tone, but that is appropriate, given the subject matter. What stayed with me most, other than the disturbing descriptions of chants and punishments, was Offred's boredom, the sense of loss that pervades the book. Bereft of her job and the right to read books or own anything, Offred has no distractions from her own thoughts, which she refers to as 'attacks of the past'. She frequently dwells on people and things she has lost -- people and things she used to take for granted, and now will never see again. Furthermore, she endlessly analyses her own thoughts, feelings and actions, simply because she has nothing else to do. Atwood does a great job describing Offred's crushing boredom and her desire for distraction, for something to give her life a little meaning. At the same time, she shows how indoctrination and forced inertia can wear an otherwise intelligent and engaged person down. Atwood's Offred is no heroine, no rebel. She sometimes has rebellious thoughts, but she never actively goes out there and makes things happen. Instead, she waits for others to give her cues, showing little initiative of her own. As a modern heroine, then, she is flawed; she is too passive really to appeal. However, as an illustration of how fear and oppression can beat an intelligent woman down and paralyse her into near-submission, she is near perfect. Those readers who complain about her passivity and lack of active engagement obviously missed the point.
As far as I'm concerned, The Handmaid's Tale has only one real flaw, which is its ending. It felt rushed to me. I didn't necessarily crave more closure; I just felt the story deserved a less abrupt ending. As for the epilogue with its almost flippant tone, I didn't really care for that either, but I can see why Atwood felt the need to include it; it definitely answered a few questions, and offered a message of hope, as well. I can see how some readers might appreciate a message of hope after such a depressing read. Personally, though, I think the book would have been even more memorable if Atwood had remained true to the style and tone of the rest of the book. It would have made a chilling read just a tad more compelling."
"I can be a bit of a dag at times - before I started this I heard somewhere that it was her first novel - and so I figured I would start my review by saying something like, "it was okay, but I'm sure she will get better as she goes on." I've just checked and it was not her first novel, or anything like her first. All the same, I stand by my conviction that she will get better as a novelist - even if it turns out that some of those better novels will now have been written before this one.
That seems an unduly harsh criticism - and there were things about this book I liked very much - but I didn't feel that it quite worked as well for me as her other books have. I'm not as keen on her overtly science fiction works. This one and Oryx and Crake didn't quite work for me. I think because they reminded me respectively of 1984 and Brave New World - both of which I think were better novels. It seems that one of the key ingredients in a science fiction dystopia is a war that may or may not be real and the banning of love. How hard can that be to write?
Well, no, this is a much better book than that. There was a point at about the middle where my ears pricked up. She was describing the first time she went into the Commander's room and told the story twice, with modifications, and said at the end of each telling - 'that is a reconstruction' - or words to that effect. There are a number of times in the telling of this story where that sort of irony, that sort of mirror holding, happens and it is quite nice and quite interesting. The book ends in another interesting kind of mirror holding, an ironic questioning of the verity of the story we have just been told. All this should have been enough to get me to say this is a very good book.
The loony, totalitarian types in this novel are Fundamentalist Christian types of the Old Testament school - you know, this book should have had everything going for it. It has been frequently challenged in an attempt to have it banned from US high school libraries, due to the supposed anti-religious nature of the text - something that says an awful lot that is very interesting (and frightening) about what those bastards think religion is.
But it still didn't work for me. I couldn't help feeling that it was more a collection of short stories on a theme - rather than a novel. I'm not sure I can explain that as well as I ought. It made sense that this was her first novel - even when it turned out not to be. It reads like a first novel, by someone not yet comfortable with the form. Other of her books - The Blind Assassin say, or Cat's Eye didn't feel like that at all. The Robber Bride did in part too, I guess, but it was told in various voices and so that helps explain that - and this one is too, of course, but even the long bit told in a consistent voice is more bitsy - or felt more bitsy to me.
The thing she does in this and in The Blind Assassin is to tell you a story where you think, "Gosh, imagine making all that up - what a horrible world - these fiction writers have such nasty imaginations", and then she will tell you where in history precisely these things happened, really happened, not just made up. This doesn't leave the reader thinking 'fact is stranger than fiction', but more 'god, have we got things to answer for'.
It might be that now was just not the right time for me to read this book, but it just wasn't as good as I had hoped it might be.
There is a film, I believe - the sex scenes (based on one of those truly bizarre stories from the Old Testament that makes you wonder how the Bible ever got to be considered a book of moral guidance - and which gives this novel its title) might be quite amusing to watch on the film. I don't mean for any assistance these scenes might offer for masturbation, there was little to nothing 'sexy' about the sex scenes in this book - well, unless one attended an English Public School, perhaps. It is a pity I've gone off films so much - as this might have been one that would be worth watching - although, given how much of the book is inside the main character's head, I'm not sure it really would work too well on film. Hard to know."
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