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[KKC - Ooh, Oryx and Crake. I loved that one.]
I just reread this over the summer. It was chilling to read when we have a religious zealot (or two) in the White House. A lot of the dramatic flourishes - the chanting, the the sexual arrangement of wife-handmaid-Commander - don't seem "realistic" in the sense that I can picture them happening the US. I think it's clear that Atwood is allowing a little hyperbole into her portrait of what could happen on the slippery slope of legislating morality and specifically the morality of female sexuality/reproduction.
However, much of the premise is shockingly believable.
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. [...] That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
*Shudder.*
The part of the book I like less are when she (the narrator & by extension Atwood) suggests that a secret misogyny, or at least desire to control women, lurks beneath the surface of even the most sensitive man - although, to be fair, she acknowledges that her suspicion . In general, I don't care for the woman v man aspects of the story, which I feel obscure the more crucial plotline of a powerful theocracy slowly but surely stripping citizens of their rights and culture.
Incidentally, the book takes place in Boston, which besides being a famously liberal US city, made national news nearly ten years after THT was written, when John Salvi killed two people and wounded 5 more in an abortion clinic in Brookline (1994). |
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