The Handmaid's Tale

Here's a dystopian "speculative fiction" novel from thirty years ago that deals heavily in gender politics. In a not-distant future, a super-fundamentalist Christian sect has taken over the government and ushered in a new world order. Abortions, homosexuality, and all religions other than this "Sons of Jacob" sect of Christianity have been outlawed and are punishable by death. Women are no longer allowed to own any property, they must always cover themselves from head to toe out in public, and if they are unable to bear healthy children after six years of trying - with old and mostly sterile men, it turns out - they're shipped out to "the colonies," a vaguely terrifying prospect. Correspondingly, all women are perpetually on suicide watch.

As with any piece of dystopian fiction, the difference between a compelling read and some forgettable tripe lies largely with the world-building, and perhaps more specifically, the way the world is revealed to the reader. My biggest gripe with Nineteen Eighty-Four was how its entire second act was basically just a long-winded essay on Orwell's future world. It's impressive and important to flesh out your imagined setting in any work of fiction, but beating the reader over the head with nothing but details and histories is ill-suited for story-telling.

Margaret Atwood passes that test easily here. Although the novel mostly consisted of the main character slowly revealing more and more about this new society, it unfolded in an interesting and easy-to-digest manner. It would have been one thing for her to say, "imagine, one day, a super-Christian nation where…" and then expand upon such a hypothetical totalitarian state for forty pages or so, but here we're able to connect with a woman from that world and to see it through her eyes.

The whole thing ends grimly and without much of a conclusion for several of the characters, beyond those who things end poorly for, and at first I was a little annoyed at the open-endedness of the story. But I soon realized that the story itself, and its ending, didn't really matter here; the purpose of the book was to come up with a frightening satirical super-Christian society and then breathe some life into it in the form of relatable and understandable characters.

I was a big fan of this one, and I'll surely be back with more from Margaret Atwood in the future.