The book starts slowly with a description of the unnamed narrator’s book. May be that was the reason I had to restart the book after having read the first two chapters awhile ago. Once you are fully immersed and you understand the dystopian society, it really is a page-turner thriller.
This is the story of Offred, who takes her name from Fred (Of Fred), the commander to whom she was posted. This is one of those futuristic, dystopian, fascist societies stories such as 1984, or A brave new world, in which the ideas of some people are imposed upon all the society. Around the 1970s, the sexual revolution favored the birth control, the abortion and the spread of sexual diseases such as syphilis or HIV (referred to as AIDS in the book). The author lived in the context of the Cold War, so the conflict with the USSR was still in vogue. A lethal virus was inserted into the caviar that the high Russian executives would consume. However that virus ended up in the high ranking commanders of the United States, rendering them sterile. Most of these secrets are revealed at the end of the book, in the chapter entitled “historical notes”, in which a expert in history is talking at a meeting about a tale found in cassettes in Maine, a tale titled The Handmaid’s Tale, which is the book in question.
Offred had a normal life in New England, presumably in Boston, where she graduated from college, where she had her best friend Moira. She eventually got together with a previously married man, Luke, and had a girl with him. Life was normal until bizarre things started to happen politically, which people decided to let go, maybe because they feared the consequences or didn’t think protesting would have any impact. First, the president is killed, then the Constitution is abolished. Then the human rights are stripped first from women. Women cannot go to work anymore, and they cannot own property. Then they start attacking more populations: the gays (or gender traitors), divorced people, people form other religions, etc. The new government, called Gilead, based on the lowering birth rates starts taking actions to favor the reproduction, and those are to make reproduction the only feminine focus. Women that can bear children are taken to Red Centers, which are reeducation centers to prepare women to become handmaids. Handmaids are posted in commanders houses, and the commanders are to copulate with the handmaids (while their wives lie below in a bizarre threesome) in the hopes of getting them pregnant. Everything is based on religion, this is a highly religious theocracy, in which these weird reproductive sins are based in the story of Jacob, Rachel and Bilhah. The country becomes a police state surrounded by walls. In the walls the detractors of the system are hanged, as are people from other religions or doctors that performed abortions or anything against reproduction. Handmaids are highly observed, they can only go shopping in pairs, where the other handmaid is a spy and can report any suspicious activity from her peer.
Offred tells her tale from the moment she arrived to Commander Fred’s household. In there she learns that the previous handmaid hung herself. Everything is ceremonial: women are taken together to events such as the Birth Day, where everyone gathers to celebrate the birth of a new child, to weddings or to the particicution, where women kill a convicted man. The act of reproduction also is ceremonial, it is actually called The Ceremony, and begins with the commander reading a fragment of the Bible. Sex is prohibited for non-reproductive reasons.
Once Atwood has painted and described all of this situation, the action starts: the commander wants to see Offred secretly in person in his office. This is highly forbidden, for them to be together alone. The commander feeds her magazines, information, words, which was also forbidden: handmaids should not read, and magazines were totally prohibited, which boosted promiscuity and immorality. But this becomes their little secret and they start seeing each other more frequently.
The commander’s wife starts getting closer to Offred and tells her his husband might be sterile (she doesn’t use this word because it’s also forbidden – men always can, if she’s not pregnant is the woman’s fault), so they should try other ways. At first Offred is cautious because it is highly punishable to have sex with other men or to even mention the possibility of betraying the commander. The wife tells here everyone does it: in fact, Janine, one of the handmaids became pregnant by using another semen donor. Also, the doctor once proposed Offred to impregnate her (becoming pregnant was a high honor for women, they were treated really good – after giving birth, the baby was given to the commander and his wife, and the handmaid taken to another house). Eventually they settled on doing it: Nick, the chauffeur would be the impregnator.
Meanwhile, the commander kept treating Offred like her girlfriend, taking her to a private secret club (also highly illegal) where commanders would gather and see women dancing (Offred meets Moira there, where Moira tells her about her escape, and how she was captured and given the opportunity to work there or to go to the Colonies – where women were used to clean up radioactive waste, killing them in about 3 years). Offred goes to a room with the commander and they intimate.
After the first night with Nick, Offred became infatuated and started visiting him every day. This was really dangerous as both would be killed if caught by the guards or the towers. She became so in love that she forgot the rest of her ideals and motivation. She was working with her peer Ofglen to try to discover the commander’s plan and build the resistance, but she became bored with that matter, and uninterested. She became lousy and stopped being careful with being caught.
One day, Ofglen is caught by the black van and taken. Most likely her rebellious ideas were discovered. Now the angels would have to interrogate everyone involved, including her shopping partner Offred. This represented a big risk for everyone in the household: the commander for intimating with her and making her read; the wife for organizing her impregnation by Nick, and Nick for having sex with Offred almost every day. The next day a black van gets to the house to pick Offred up. Nick tells her it’s alright, it’s Mayday: it’s the resistance and she can go with them. But Offred doesn’t know if she can trust Nick: at the end of the day the chauffeurs are eyes too. She is taken by the black van and we are left with an open ending, we don’t know if the black van was in fact part of the resistance and did help her escape, or if she was brutally tortured for all of her faults. However, the fact that her memoir survived tends to mean that she did too.
As additional comments: there are a couple of similarities with Infinite Jest, a novel based in Boston and the New England Area in a postnuclear world were the northern New England became a wasteland (or the Great Convexity / Concavity) after nuclear accidents, and there are people being born deformed. Also, while simultaneously watching the TV show, the show took a lot of liberties, in which the show is just slightly based on the novel, the story, ideas, characters and backgrounds are totally altered. This is ironic given Margaret Atwood is a woman, and in her literary universe women’s works are discredited: her work is also being discredited and turned into whatever the director wanted.
by LiterallySagan