‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ - a Review

This book was not what I was expecting. Based on my experience of having seen the film adaptation thirty years ago, I anticipated more of a thriller with a strong critique of religion and what are thought of as traditionally patriarchal societies, painted in the broad strokes of the handmaids' blood-red costumes and their tenuous position in the world of Gilead.

Instead, 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a deeply personal and paranoid work by Margaret Atwood. A first-person narrative, the book features little to no dialogue and a lot of details about the dystopian society of Gilead that are difficult to consider. We get all Offred, all the time - her every observation, feeling, desire and fear. It's a claustrophobic memoir of one woman's uncertainty about the psychotic world in which she lives. Will she live? Will she die? And what do those concepts mean in a world that is so tightly controlled, its moving parts forever sawing each other's legs out from under the next person either above or below them in the hierarchy?

Atwood's book is not a tome to be taken lightly; you have to be willing to take a deep dive into treacherous waters with the main character, and that's not a task for the faint of heart. In the balance, I would recommend this book not only for the disturbing questions it asks about the ability of human beings to descend into collective insanity; but also for it's willingness to dive into a headspace where there are no simple answers, a place of moral quandaries cast not in red but in maddening shades of gray.