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review 2020-06-01 14:19
The Handmaids Tale
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

by Margaret Atwood

 

My first impression of this book was that it reminded me of Anne Frank's diary, writing in journal form about an oppressive situation in which the person writing must survive. Considering it was first released in 1985, the present tense writing that continued caught me off guard. It was unusual before the self-pub explosion in 2010.

 

The tale shows a future society where the freedoms we take for granted have been removed and women in particular are assigned roles and expected to conform to them, including providing babies for couples in more privileged positions but unable to produce their own. Citizens spy on each other and dissention makes people disappear.

 

We are never given the main character's real name because women are referred to by their captain's name; Offred, Ofwarren, etc. She has flashbacks to how life was 'before' that identify this as a society that took over what we would recognise as modern Western life. She misses a lover whose fate she does not know and a child they had together who was taken from her. There is occasional mention of a war, but details are slow to be revealed.

 

I found the story continually depressing. Obviously the whole point is that no one would want to live in such an oppressive world and it was interesting to see how some women managed to adapt, though many didn't. The change is still first generation and those in charge insist the next generation will find the new society perfectly natural, as they've never known anything else.

 

I saw some parallels with American black slavery in that children were taken away from parents with no sympathy for the mother's sense of loss. Also in that deviating from what was considered accepted behaviour resulted in physical punishment or even death.

 

What I found most interesting is that the men weren't enjoying the restrictions on themselves either. Human nature was never meant to be regimented.

 

I found the ending... tedious. An attempt by the author to be clever that fell flat and some essential unanswered questions. I'm glad I've read this now, but even more glad that I don't have to read it again.

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text 2019-12-27 06:16
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

After reading The Handmaid's Tale, I can perceive any reason why this tragic exemplary has established such a connection on such a significant number of. This is a book that unquestionably hangs with you, frequenting your musings, long after you finish the book. It is provocative and frightening.

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review 2019-10-25 17:58
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

I didn't have an opportunity to write a review for this when I finished it several weeks ago, so I'm going to write a *very* brief review. I read this for Dystopian Hellscape. It was the first dystopian I'd read for ages and I loved it. Yes, it had a cloying, claustrophobic atmosphere, but that's exactly what it needed. It was equal parts riveting and shocking and even though Atwood's style was at times a little dry I could hardly put it down. I've already got TheTestaments and plan to read it as soon as I've gotten over this part of the story.

 

I transfigured A Grimm Tale to Dystopian Hellscape for this one.

 

 

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review 2019-09-30 20:10
Halloween Bingo 2019: The Fourth Week
Death from a Top Hat - Clayton Rawson
Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31) - Terry Pratchett
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

Reading blackout before the end of the first bingo month and two more completed bingos in week 4 for a total of three bingos so far -- if anybody had told me this going in, I'd have questioned their sanity.  Not least because I had a major project to complete this month, which I knew was going to involve a lot of meetings and time in the car -- but all that time spent driving, and waiting for meetings to begin, turned out a blessing in disguise.  Either way, I'll take it!  Especially since my final reads for my card turned out really, really great as well.

 

Now that I've completed my books for the squares on my card, I'm going to move on to a couple of the squares not on my card -- first and foremost those from which I'd have picked my options for my three transfiguration spells if I had needed them.  I'll be posting my progress with those on my bingo master tracking post.

 

The Books

 

Clayton Rawson: Death from a Top Hat

My first book of the week was another excursion into the world of Golden Age mysteries; this time one set in the U.S.; the first book of Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini series, focusing on a famous magician who, instead of resting on his laurels, has opened a magic shop and, as a sideline, agrees to help the police solving crimes set in his milieu.

 

Like most locked room mysteries, this book is best enjoyed in print -- or if as an audiobook, at least with the print edition not too far away, as the print edition includes images of the crime scenes (yes, there are several) as well as other diagrams, all of which are darned near indispensable to following the plot, let alone trying to solve the mystery.  As you'd expect in any book with a magician at its center, slights of hand, trap doors and other instances of misdirection play a huge part here, and although they are not all visual, being able to trace them on the scene of crime images helps a lot.

 

What I particularly enjoyed in this book, though, were its manifold hattips to virtually all the great authors and detectives of Golden Age crime fiction -- Rawson's contemporaries as well as those of prior decades.  There is a long paragraph right at the beginning of the book, and many more references throughout; some (from a modern reader's POV) a bit veiled, some less so -- although doublessly all of them would have made instant sense to Rawson's contemporary readers.  Rawson truly treasured the great mystery authors of his own time, and in turn, John Dickson Carr considered him one of the masters of the locked room genre and one of the six best mystery writers of the era: One may or may not agree with the second part of that compliment, but there is no doubt about the truth of the first part, and I am glad that, once more, Martin Edwards (in his two nonfiction books on the Golden Age) and Otto Penzler (by republishing this particular book) have collectively brought him to my attention.

 

 

Delia Owens: Where the Crawdads Sing

A wonderfully atmospheric book set in the marshes on the North Carolina coast; the story of Kya Clark, who is successively abandoned by her entire family while still a child, manages to survive in the derelict family home with the help of a few well-meaning friends, autodidactically (though jump-started by a former friend of her elder brother's, who eventually becomes her friend as well) turns herself into a marshland biologist, ecologist and science writer of considerable renown -- and yet finally has to face up to her community's lifelong prejudice arising from her unusual lifestyle, over an accusation with potentially catastrophic consequences.

 

The bulk of the book is told in two parallel timelines; one following Kya from childhood to adult life; the other set during her young adult age and dealing with the event that will eventually threaten to bring her very life and existence under threat.  (It is at this latter point that both timelines merge into one.)  Kya is a heroine impossible not to root for, and Owens's writing, particularly in the first half of the book, is richly lyrical and emotive (without ever overstepping the boundaries towards facile emotionality), taking you right into the Carolina marshes, and into Kya's person.   In the second part, I could have done with a somewhat less extensive exploration of the courtroom scenario -- which may sound weird, coming from me, as I do enjoy courtroom scenes a lot in mysteries (and of course courtrooms also feature rather largely in my day job); however, even though Owens was obviously using the sterile, formalistic operations of the state justice system as a deliberately jarring contrast with the freedom of Kya's life in the marshes and her intimacy with nature, I felt that part of the book could have done with a bit of streamlining.  Overall, though, this was a wonderful discovery and definitely one of the highlights among this year's bingo reads.

 

 

Terry Pratchett: Monstrous Regiment

I had initially been planning to read Terry Pratchett's Pyramids (also the Discworld group's October group read) for this square, but given that I was ready for the square before October had rolled around and I still want to do the Discworld group read in any event, a quick switch to another one of Pratchett's (de facto) standalone Discworld novels was called for; the justification for being applied to the "Deadlands" square being provided, in this particular instance, by a vampire named Maladict (who has managed to switch his craving for blood into a craving for coffee) and a few, albeit minor appearances by Ankh-Morpork Night Watch member Reg Shoe, who is a zombie.

 
As the title indicates, Monstrous Regiment is an exploration of the role of women and their fitness for positions within the official power structure of the state; and Pratchett wouldn't be Pratchett if he didn't take the phrase literally and set the whole thing in the context of the military -- and not in peace time either, but in war.  (John Knox's original treatise, from whose title the book's name derives -- The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women -- was a polemic against female monarchs.)  Moreover, it also served as a fitting run-up to my final bingo books, Margaret Atwood's Gilead duology (The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments), as the core of the action is set in a country that is modeled on countries with an extremely restrictive, religion-based attitude towards women ... as well as the warmongering craze of the Nazis.  As a satirical exploration of society and what makes it tick, it isn't quite as polished and on point as Guards! Guards! (which I only read last week), but that is really nitpicking -- it's still easily one of Terry Pratchett's best offerings ... outside the Witches subseries, that is.

 

 

 

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

See separate post HERE.

 

 

The Card

... as of today; with my "virgin" card below for reference:

 
 
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review 2019-09-29 21:15
Gilead
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood,Claire Danes
The Testaments - Margaret Atwood,Mae Whitman,Ann Dowd,Bryce Dallas Howard,Tantoo Cardinal,Derek Jacobi

Well, that was as soul-drenching as any double bill ever was (even though The Testaments is marginally more optimistic than The Handmaid's Tale). 

 

It's not always a good idea for an author to revisit one of their standout classics decades later, but in this instance it clearly worked.  Atwood stays faithful to the original tale while supplying additional depth to the world she created there.  (Now it remains to be seen whether the TV series, in turn, is going to stay true to the story as set out in The Testaments, which is set a decade and a half later.  Though I'm not sure Atwood herself considers more than a few basic facts from the TV series "canon" as far as her novels are conscerned.) 

 

And Atwood has clearly done her homework on dictatorships, theocratic and otherwise -- which is, of course, a large part of what makes Gilead come across as so goddamned credible (and hence, so goddamned frightening).  Like the authors of other dystopias (Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Du Maurier's Rule Britannia) -- and also like Terry Pratchett in the first Night Watch novel, Guards' Guards! -- she points out that once a country's democratic foundations have been allowed to weaken, it doesn't even take a violent toppling of government for a dictatorship to take root -- and while she may have been inspired by recent events to revisit Gilead and write The Testaments, this clearly is at the heart of The Handmaid's Tale as well, as it is there that the notion is presciently first given voice.

 

I'm glad I went through both novels back to back, and Halloween Bingo couldn't have ended on a bigger exclamation mark.  I also fervently hope the world doesn't even get within the equator's total length of Gilead, however; or rather, the actually existing theocracies will eventually be rooted out once and for all and no new ones will be added, anywhere on earth.  Most especially and for the immediate future I hope the Western world will come to its collective senses and manage to make a U-turn from the course that it started to take somewhere around the mid-2010s.  Heaven knows what the participants of late-22nd century historical conferences will otherwise have to say about us.

 

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