Recent reads:

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
A startling and engrossing vision of dystopia. I won't bother to recap the basic premise ofthe book since, like me, most people reading this blog have probably become aware of that premise through exposure to the book, the movie, or the discussions that it has inspired since its publication in 1986.

The book's still worth reading, even for someone who already knows that premise. It's a tour de force of writing in which Atwood never seems to hit a single wrong note in her first-person portrayal of a woman trapped in a living hell. Even the "villainous" characters who are responsible for her enslavement are believable and, at times, sympathetic in their own twisted way. (If anyone thinks that such a society cannot exist, or that women would automatically rise in righteous rebellion against it, he or she would do well to read up on revolutionary Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, 19th-century Utah, or the present-day Short Creek community of polygamists.)

Part of the reason Atwood's story is so effective is because the reader's viewpoint and knowledge are so strictly limited that we feel as closed-in and claustrophobic as the protagonist. The reader is trapped inside the perceptions and thoughts of the"handmaid" of the title, both literally and metaphorically blinkered and unable to see anything outside the hellishly confined world to which she's restricted. We're even denied knowledge of her real name, just as that name is denied to her by the society in which she lives.

In Nancy Pearl's scheme of things, this is a setting-driven novel. My interest in the book was driven by intense curiosity about the world that Atwood created: how it worked, how it came to exist, how people managed to live in it. Although the protagonist "Offred" and the other characters she describes are indeed compelling, the impact of the novel depends almost entirely on the setting as it is gradually, haltingly, revealed, and to a lesser degree on her own backstory as it is gradually and reluctantly revealed in a series of flashbacks, dreams, and uncomfortable reminiscences. It's implied that she's been tortured into submission -- "broken" -- after being torn away from her husband and child. We know, because she describes it, that she's been put through a "training program" that most people would consider brainwashing. And throughout the novel we have a ringside seat inside her head as her memories of a better time, and her desire to escape her current life, vie with the vile things she has to do and the submissive facade she has to maintain in order to survive.

All this makes for powerful drama, but I found myself reading on not because I was particularly interested in "Offred"'s current or future emotional state, or whether she became pregnant or not, or even what her eventual fate might be, but because, in a horrified way, I wanted to know more about the world in which she lived. How did it come to be? And how did people manage to live in it? And what might eventually become of it?

A measure of this can be seen in the fact that the reader is never actually told what eventually happens to "Offred". The story she tells simply trails off into silence after a critical moment, after which we're given a kind of framing device in the form of an academic presentation about the provenance and background of the "soi-disant manuscript" that we've been reading. We don't find out much more about "Offred" than she's already told us, and we certainly don't find out what happened to her after the events she describes. What we do get is some context, a few more details about the "Gileadite regime" in which she lived, all of it couched in a stream of condescending, trivializing academic jokes that seem downright ghoulish after what we've just read. It's tempting to think that Atwood is just poking fun at the affectations of academia, but it's also possible that she has bigger game in mind. I'll leave that as a question for discussion should anyone feel so inclined.

Edit, 5/25: corrected publication date of Handmaid's Tale. Thanks to S. and Fiend.