. Spinning .

Ah, here is where Atwood comes up with language use that lures the reader back into a literary frame of mind, straight into the dangers of her world:

I can’t think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron.  A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.  Women took medicines, pills, men prayed trees, cows at grass, all that souped-up piss flowed into rivers.  Not to mention the exploding atomic power plants, along the San Andreas fault, nobody’s fault, during the earthquakes, and the mutant strain of syphilis no mold could touch.  Some did it to themselves, had themselves tied shut with catgut or scarred with chemicals.  How could they, said Aunt Lydia, oh how could they have done such a thing?  Jezebels!  Scorning God’s gifts!  Wringing her hands.  (p. 112)

So here, in a paragraph, we find maybe not how, but what happened to change our future world that Atwood presents.  The fear of the population dying out, the abducting and training of some women who would serve as vessels, suitable for childbirth.  But without the free will to choose.  To choose when, or with whom.  And the possibility always there, that even if egg and sperm successfully meet, that a monster rather than a much needed human being may be the result.

Whew.  Kinda scary stuff.  And Atwood has laid out her web of workings in hints of the past amid the facts of the present (future) to finally hit us with what we’ve been thinking in much less hard-hitting terms.

A third of the way through, I find that we’ve only covered about three days in the present.  The backstory is in layers:  Offred’s past, just prior to this when she was "in training"; her life with her husband and daughter; her life prior to marriage; her life as a child. 

Seems like an awful lot of catching up to do, but it occurred to me that in science fiction of this sort, where the future is based upon a current society and environment familiar to the reader, it would be necessary to explain the changes, especially when we’re dropped into this new society so structurally different than our own.  We are made aware of a civil war in progress, but we wonder if a war brought about this society and its political theories, or if the war came about as a result of it.  Since the televised news seems to imply that "we" are fighting the "rebels," I’m assuming that at the very least, this society is being attacked by another in dissension.  To throw a monkey wrench in, Atwood has visitors from Japan wearing short skirts and being overly made up and sexy–totally against what Offred is showing us is her current reality.

Another thing that becomes obvious to me, is that the experience of the reader plays an integral part in this novel in particular.  It didn’t, for example, strike me as so very odd that the religious tone was set, the pious, the clothing Offred wears that is so very familiar to me in my Catholic upbringing.  Atwood is making a statement here, and my experience of her as a vocal feminist does shade the story.  Double-shades, perhaps; Atwood’s influence on the writing and my own take of Atwood, as well as this writing.

It still hits me as a bit strange, however, that a society would go so far backward in its thinking as to prohibit women from reading, and protect them so totally as to be oppressive.  I want to know what caused this topsy-turvy world.

First of all, the sci-fi element surprised me–being an Atwood novel.  But she (who I can’t help but say reminds me of Rhea Perlman [Carla on Cheers] ) has always played a bit with time and the lives of her characters. 

The writing’s a bit laborious, although it appears I’ve flown through forty pages without realizing it.  The protagonist, Offred (of Fred?), seems to be a designated childbearer in the world of the future.  But the writing, as I say, is all tell:

We turn the corner onto a main street, where there’s more traffic.  Cars go by, black most of them, some gray and brown.  There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and greend and cheap and skimpy, that mark the omen of the poorer men.  Econowives, they’re alled.  These women are not divided into functions.  They have to do everything; if they can.  Sometimes, there is a woman all in black, a widow.  There used to be more of them, but they seem to be diminishing.  You don’t see the Commandeers’ Wives on the sidewalks.  Only in cars.  (p. 24)

I used to read a lot of science ficture and a bit of fantasy, but one thing that strikes me here is the specific social status of the populace.  This seems a common trend in stories about a future world and I wonder about it; it being so in conflict with our centuries of gearing towards a world where all are equal.  Is it a throwback to our past?  What makes the author dream up a world where this division becomes the norm?   

In Atwood’s novel there are Marthas, Angels, Aunts, Wives, Handmaids, Guardians, Commandeers, etc.  There are uniforms.  There are the oppressors and the oppressed.  Can we not dream up new evils for mankind but instead, must reach into our past?

Tough decision–what to read next.  But with about 150 books on the shelf, all now nice and neatly alphabetized by author, it’s quite a delight to be able to browse and pull out what strikes me.

There are quite a few Hemingways to read, and some others like The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Passage to India and so many more have been calling out to me.  But Atwood won my attention for several reasons; I like her work, I have a few of her books on the shelf, and I’ve been intrigued by the generally great reviews The Handmaid’s Tale seems to have accumulated.

So that, while still pushing through Barthes, Hypertext, and Ethics, is what’s open on the table right now.