No spoilers please!
I’ve started The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrative grabbed me immediately, but so far it’s mostly about a dystopian society where women have been subjugated into human cattle to be bred, the ones that are fertile, a description of the present, with current happenings from the narrator’s perspective, and much reminiscing about the good old normal days. Don’t consider this statement my negative critique, as I am in the first couple of chapters and the stage still maybe being set.
However, I’m not usually into stories all about misery, and without dropping spoilers about the book (or the tv series), I’d like to know if this story goes somewhere significantly? I don’t want to know if it is a happy or unhappy ending for the narrator, but it would be nice if there is some shakeup in the status quo.
As I ask this, I also wonder if I should be asking? Sometimes there are thrills to be found in such stories, not knowing as I think of the Shawshank Redemption, but in other stories, it has been, why did I just read this, as I think of Cold Mountain or maybe The Road, the latter, I only saw the movie.
So maybe just say it’s well worth the read, or not. 🙂
I finished this dystopian story and it is a painful portrayal of female subjugation under the guise of reproductive necessity, at the hands of a murderous fascist regime with a religious wrapper, where everyone is locked into strict rules of conduct, with dire punishments. In some cases punishments where group behavior is encouraged to bring justice to the accused even if it is all just another scam and form of control.
What this woman, and women around her have to go through is a frick’n nightmare although it’s easy to argue that everyone in this story is oppressed. Despite this oppression, there is subtle rebellion, as human needs resist the restrictive bonds placed on them as both oppressed and oppressors. The story pace picks up a bit once the heroine finds an outlet for her restricted existence.
I won’t say whether it was a happy ending or not, but it ends with another chapter to wade through, devoted to an after the fact symposium (part of the story) discussing the manuscript that was discovered and historical details that add to the story.
Can I recommend it? For myself no, the verbose nature of observation and reflection, while intricate and creative, painting a vivid picture, was simply too much, more than I wanted and I ended up skimming through many pages to get to the next part of the actual story.
It might appeal to you, if you like being awash in a sea of vividly descriptive, meandering detail, extensive remembrances, with seeming-less jumps from present, to past, back to present, with page upon page devoted to the analysis of a variety of human emotions, like
what is Love, how it was then as compared to now. Into this structure, tidbits of story are inserted like raisins in rice pudding. It reads much like how it might be to read someone’s thoughts as they flow by.
Now for the TV series, is it better? I have to believe it can’t go into the same depth of descriptive detail, that the narrative is forced to move forward at a faster pace and that it is probably spiffed up a bit with excitement and tension. Maybe they treat the book as the core setting and then run with the story of the rise and fall of this regime.
