Last night, page 89, I was ready to hang it up for all the bleakness. There are some grisly scenes involving giant meat hooks, and I'm not one to be entertained by impaling human flesh with anything. Think: the Taliban joins forces with Focus on the Family and creates a society kept in check by teenage boys with big guns. I believe I had nightmares.
The setting is futuristic where environmental degradation has created a world in which most women are infertile for all the poisoning and pollution (and certainly men are infertile too, but it's illegal to call men infertile, it's always the women's fertility at issue), so most women are "unwomen" and most babies are "unbabies." The women who by chance do carry working ovaries have the option of becoming a Handmaid, a role of sexual slavery, bearing children for upper class military families, submitting to strange rituals in conception and birth so that the Wife-class of women receive the babies as their own.
And whoa bessy, can Margaret Atwood concoct strange rituals. Although in the author's notes she insists that everything she put in the book is based on truths from different times and places.
So this morning, page 93 brings on "the ceremony," what this society calls the process of conception, for lack of a better phrase. Bizarre. Later the reader finds that the birthing process is equally strange. I'll let you read for yourself the details but I'll say that it's three mostly clothed human beings, united in a most peculiar way. The most opposite of intimacy you could possibly get, which is actually the point of the entire society, to ban human interaction on pretty much all levels.
It's strange, alright, but I couldn't stop reading. And now, on page 163, the reader discovers what the Commander of the house wants most, what is most contraband, what is most forbidden, what is most lacking. I won't give away any spoilers here, in case you haven't yet read the book, but I will say it's pretty surprising. Margaret Atwood is genius.
I'll close with this review from the Washington Post Book World: "A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex...Just as the world of Orwell's '1984' gripped our imaginations, so with the world of Atwood's handmaid!"
At page 163 the reader still doesn't know what happens to unwomen and unbabies. This reader isn't sure she wants to know. This is another book that I'll probably never watch the movie rendition. Too visually graphic for my taste. But a real page turner, although I've decided to only read it during daylight hours. "The Handmaid's Tale" does not make for peaceful sleeping.
Your thoughts?
