As I said, I wasn’t nuts about Offred, the main character in this novel, and while I’m open-minded enough to accept what an author is laying down as setting, environment, language, etc., I did also have a small problem suspending a belief that the good old U.S.A. could never end up in this society as Atwood has presented it. If anything, I figured our people would forsake clothing and be running around nude before they’d put on the habit of a nun–or even require others to do so.
But Atwood comes from a background of feminism that seeks the deeper meaning and the possible paths that come from any change in society’s norms and ideals. She may fear the religious zealot; I fear more the godless liberal. Both are extremes; both, without the balance of opposing viewpoints and activists, pose potential danger. I wonder though, if the balance of power were to shift enough, or if some plan were plotted out carefully enough, and if a move were made fast enough, with the power of the internet and the way hackers can tear through it so easily, well, conceivably something could happen to upheave society.
Amazingly, Atwood not only allows the protagonist to escape, while the escape is run-of-the-mill, the way it is handled is brilliant. At the end of Chapter 46, Offred is taken away in the dreaded black van, but there is the possibility that her lover, Nick, has set this up as an escape rather than sure doom. At this point, it is up to the reader to play out the ending.
And then, Atwood zooms two centuries into the future to plop us in the middle of a seminar on the Gilead society, as taken from studies done on cassette tapes found and attributed to Offred. Since the tapes were make after rather than during her time as presented by the novel, we may assume she escaped. Atwood also takes this opportunity to lay out a bit more of the structure and inception of Gilead, which answers those questions some of us have as readers, but were clearly not necessary to the story itself. It’s an Ahah, rather than Well, jeez….
And, with Atwood’s natural instinct of keeping her readers thinking about the story long past the last page, even this final historical section ends with the main speaker asking the audience–and the reader–Any questions?
So, while dated and a bit more improbable than when the story was written in 1985, and despite my distance from the protagonist, I’m still in awe of Atwood’s abilities as a writer. It seemed to me that just when I was getting bored, or aware of a slow pace, or ticked off with a particular scenario, Atwood’s timing brought me back into the story with gusto. Everything is planned out; everything, is gone over; everything is done well.
I have a few more Atwood’s on the shelf I haven’t read yet and I’ll be looking forward to these as well as ordering perhaps Good Bones and Simple Murders, or one of her newest projects.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology