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Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)


Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood



 

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”  

 

To be perfectly honest, it was the tv series that made me pick this book out and I am glad that I had the pleasure of both reading the book and watching the series. Rarely it happens that a book is perfectly adapted into visual platform of story-telling and in this case not only the tv series covers almost everything that happens along in the book but it has something more to offer, something to tie up the loose ends in the book which, I am sure, is going to and has been giving the readers nightmares.

 

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”  

 

Now lets talk about the book. The Republic of Gilead or loosely a major part of United States of America where the government was overthrown by a religious sect and a conservative set of rules are imposed upon everyone. A trained group of ladies called the Handmaids were selected to have a single function in the society, that is to bear children for the aristocrat couples who are barren. Offred is the handmaid who is the narrator of this story and her function too is to breed and to be passed down from one barren family to the nest. If she swerves then like the other rebels, she too would be hanged at the wall or sent to the Colonies to work till she dies slowly of radiation sickness. She adjust along with the flow while her future hangs in the balance on two men in the household.

 

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”  

 

Margaret Atwood has her plot set in not so distant-dystopian-future, a time where the women have lost almost everything they once fought for. The book describes in the strongest possible way the way the society crumbles for power and functionality and a weird sense of atonement. Atwood's narration is not linear throughout and at places a reader might get confused but that's only initially, and once one get along with the narrative, one can easily feel with the words presented by Offred and the state of mind and the horror it holds.

 

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”  

 

Margaret Atwood through this book speaks about the fanaticism and zealots in religious corners of the world, and how much their ideologies can genuinely affect the lives of human beings in general. The way to satiate their dogmatic insecurities taking away the very zest of one's own personal choice. Atwood has stated in the past that she didn’t put anything in her book that hadn’t already happened in real life. It mirrors how extremist ideologies can indeed alter all of our lives if not greatly throttled or extinguished. 

 

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”  

 

The Handmaid's Tale deserves a good four stars 


 


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