Bookreview: THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood
FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK
Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Vintage (Penguin Random House)
Price: £8.99
Pages: 324
Genre: Dystopia, Feminism
Year: 1985
BACK OF THE BOOK
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead.
She has only one function: to bread. If she deviates, she will, like 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 which her future hangs.
MY THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK
It took me a while to get into this book because the main character, Offred, felt so entirely different to the last protagonist I've read about. (click here to see my review on the last book I read, "The Bell Jar") The writing style was also quite different, which is why I needed some time to get used to it.
I really enjoyed te short paragraphs and short chapters because such a thing always fastens my reading speed.
I found the general plot very interesting but I was never too much a fan of dystopias, so it took me a while to get used to that "future world" and its system and everything that came with it.
The main character grew more and more on me, the more she opened herself towards the reader.
After approximately 50 pages I was really involved in the story and very much enjoyed reading it.
The narrator keeps flashing back to her past, sometimes within a single sentence, and that confused me a lot. It also made me question the narrator's reliability a bit.
I think that the concept of the system in that dystopian republic is very scary but also very interesting to read about. It's definitely something that demands you to think about it.
There is a tv series that is based on this novel, starring Joseph Fiennes and Samira Wiley (who played Poussey Washington in ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK) and now, after I've finished this book, I'd really love to watch this series.
The cover of my edition of this book was quite simple but felt very fitting to the plot. I liked that it gave me as the reader an image of what the handmaids have looked like.
What really surprised me in this book, was how sexual it got at times. It was never actually explicit but left a lot to the imagination, which made it even more indecent in my opinion. And I really enjoyed that.
For me, there was really some chemistry between the Commander and Offred, which I would love to see outplayed in the tv series. I found the Commander to generally be a very layered and interesting character and would have loved to get to know more about him.
I wasn't too sure what to think of the ending though. And since I don't want to give anything away, I won't say too much more here. The ending just confused me a lot and sort of ripped me out of the story in a quite brutal way. I felt unprepared and therefore read the last pages with a distance to the book that I hadn't had before. Generally, the ending was a bit frustrating.
CONCLUSION
It took me approximately 50 pages to get into this book, but afterwards I really enjoyed it a lot. I found the plot to be very interesting and thought a lot about it. I found the writing style to be quite thrilling and always read a lot of pages in one sitting - also because the chapters were so wonderfully short. There were a lot of characters, mainly the narrator, Offred, and the Commander, that I found very interesting and layered. I wish there would have been even more information on both of them.
Still, I feel like the story could have been even more fascinating, and I'm not sure whether I like the ending, but it is nevertheless still a very good story that definitely encourages the reader to overthink society and gender roles.
I would definitely recommend this book if the plot seems interesting to you.
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