The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling
social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an
Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the
Republic of Gilead - a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing,
and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether
were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true
(as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been
adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to
bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being
certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying
islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the
hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers,
Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by
the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the
husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful - if she does not
want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her
mother, her husband - dead - and small daughter, all taken away
during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a
gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur - something
that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's
hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private
parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust.
This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is
very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read
Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are
two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory
chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific,
imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization - this
is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest - and long on
cynicism - it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as
Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a
world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified
fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and
impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Republic of Gilead allows Offred only one function - to breed.
If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the
wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a
repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor
that of the two men on whom her future hangs.
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