Handmaid's Tale

I read this book as a teenager and it made such an impression on me - all about how women can be controlled through their fertility. Scary stuff!

It's a book to make you think, and Atwood said when she wrote it over twenty years ago, that everything in it that goes on in Gilead was already happening somewhere in the world. To me, that's the sign of a very good book, especially one that leaves you as uncomfortable about our world as this one does.

My least favorite of Margaret Atwoods books.

This is one of my favorite books ever, and if you are unfamiliar with Atwood, this is a good place to start.

Is this any good?

It is, or at least the book is (this appears to be a radio dramatization - which I have not heard)

I have a theory about The Handmaid's Tale - I like the clever bit at the end, the epilogue almost, when centuries down the line academics looking at the evidence of The Handmaid's Tail can't place the characters in their historical context, so you have to question the validity of the auhtor's voice almost whilst remembering that documents get lost, stats are inaccurate, people in the future are only guessing what happened centuries ago but my big question is - if you were in a post-apocolyptic nightmare landscape after a nuclear attack and the leaders of the new formed society have placed a big emphasis on building up the depleted population would you do it the way the leaders in this society do it? No way. You would not forbid sex, you'd be making people have it all the time and insisiting women produce baby after baby - but I think the sad irony of the community in The Handmaid's Tale is nobody can have a baby anymore - they are all sterile - after nuclear radiation - but if people knew that they would go crazy like in P D James The Children of Men - what they do in The Handmaid's Tale is play elaborate games of authority to keep people from thinking, or worrying about the future. It's just a theory - I also think men rarely need an excsue to start imposing authoritarian rules on women in the best of cases! Judges in the UK still let off men for raping young owmen because somehow the kid asked for it by wearing a mini skirt or something.