Review: Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"

          In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood brings her acute sense of a woman’s perspective to a dystopic vision of America. Atwood’s mastery of the element of suspense fuels her enthralling vision of dystopia in the 20^th Century. America has fallen, succumbed to racial fears and prejudices, and been replaced by an inchoate, totalitarian “monotheocracy.” The Constitution has been suspended; religious freedoms and individual liberties have been replaced with government sanctioned executions, prayers, and procreation rituals. In a day when our fears and entitlements have led us to more readily embrace federally regulated controls, allowing more and more infringements into our individual rights, Atwood's vision of a totalitarian regime is stunningly poignant. It shows us what can happen when too much power resides at the top, and too little freedom remains for the individual.

          The monotheocracy that has replaced the United States has only recently risen to power. The new government’s doctrines are still developing; its initial founders still run the country. They are assisted in their endeavors by a secret police force that ensures all skeptics and heretics are eliminated. The new government’s army is constantly at war with religious and secular enemies on its borders. Yet, this story does not take place on the frontier, nor does it follow the work of the secret police. The tale focuses instead on the greatest domestic issue facing the nascent government: a dwindling population.

          Atwood’s protagonist is one of the so-called “handmaids,” a certifiably fertile woman assigned to a top ranking military or party official and his wife, so that they may conceive a child through her. Much of the population has become sterilized due to pollution and other chemical contaminants; contraception also helped dwindle the population of the United States, before it became a monotheocracy. Now contraception is illegal, and the handmaid is a vehicle for desirable population growth. The handmaid is less than a concubine, but more than a surrogate. She occupies an in-between state. The notion of handmaids is new, and Offred, the story’s protagonist, is one of the first handmaids provided to various commanders. Handmaids serve on a rotating basis. They try to conceive a child, and if they are successful, move on to a new commander and his wife after a period of weaning. They leave the child behind, for the commander and his wife to call, and raise, as their own. If the handmaid is unsuccessful, then she is transferred after her period of assignment is up. A handmaid who consistently fails to bear a child becomes an “unwoman,” a designation that carries with it assignment to a colony, where they will live out their days farming or cleaning up the contaminated waste of the former United States.

          The handmaids are often associated with slaves, in Atwood’s narrative. They must obey their commander, and especially the commander’s wife. They must keep up their strength for child-bearing. They are looked down upon by other servants, and are often despised by their commanders’ wives. They are permitted daily walks in town, and do much of their household’s shopping, but they must always travel in pairs. Most importantly, the arts of writing and reading are forbidden them. Like slaves, they are prohibited from touching pen or paper, prohibited from looking at books. In the markets, all shop names have been white-washed out, and handmaids must identify each shop by the pictures on its sign.

          Offred’s story is marked by dispossession. She has lost family, friends, and even her true name to the new government. She will even lose the name “Offred,” when she is transferred, because the name belongs to the house that she serves. Her story is characterized by trauma, a trauma marked by flashbacks and fragmented memory. Her tale is a recollection of recollections, a pieced together story made from memory, but delivered in her own voice. Her tale, in its telling, is a crime against her society, but it is a crime that she has desperately needed to commit, and it is certainly not the greatest crime that she has ever committed, as her story reveals.

          Overall, Atwood tells an excellent story, one full of suspense and intrigue. Her themes revolve around women and the abuses of them by their society. Her story also focuses on the nature of writing. In true Atwood fashion, the narrative seeks to give voice to a people disposed of their natural voice, a people who have been deprived of the instruments of communication (reading and writing) that we most often take for granted. The narrative nods to the power of the written word, and there are some veiled allusions to literary theory. Although this is not the best Atwood novel that I have read – it is bested by her more recent dystopic vision in Oryx and Crake – and it is not even her best novel focusing on women – falling to the highly acclaimed Blind Assassin – it is certainly worth a read.

JCM

17 January 2013

Review: Salman Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh"

          Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh is ostensibly a family saga, focusing on over a century of the da Gama family’s involvement in India’s spice trade industry. The saga centers on a woman, Aurora Zogoiby (neé da Gama), who becomes a prolific painter during the early 20^th century. But, the story is no simple saga, because lurking behind the rise of a family spice empire and its prolific artist, there is a darker story, a palimpsest that the tale’s narrator, the Moor of the title, slowly reveals by picking away the blander painting overlaying it.

          The da Gama spice empire is nothing but a front for the organized criminal empire of Aurora Zogoiby’s husband, Abraham Zogoiby. Abraham, a Jew who claims among his ancestors the last Moorish king of Alhambra, rises from his humble position as a clerk in a da Gama godown, when the spice empire’s young heiress, Aurora falls madly in love with him. Abraham rejects his heritage and takes his place at the helm of the spice empire, which he preserves through the Second World War by intimidating ship’s captains to brave the U-boat infested shipping lanes, with the threat certain death at the hands of disgruntled dockhands that he personally incites against them. Yet even such means leave the spice empire in peril, and Abraham must make a deal with the mother that he repudiated when he married Aurora. Abraham promises his mother that she may raise his first born son as a Jew in exchange for the gems he once discovered hidden by his mother in the community synagogue. The jewels ultimately preserve the da Gama spice empire, but they threaten connubial bliss, as Aurora, upon discovering his promise, declares a cessation of physical relations between her and her husband until her mother-in-law dies. The marriage survives, and after Abraham’s mother dies, the couple is blessed with three daughters in quick succession, and then, later by their only son, Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby.

          Moor is born with a condition, he was born four-and-a-half months too early (or perhaps, as Moor himself suggest, right on time; there is that matter of the unaccounted for night in Aurora’s travels nine months before his birth). Moor also ages twice as fast as other humans, and he has a deformed club, instead of a right hand.

          The family thrives in Bombay, where Abraham builds his criminal empire. Aurora turns a blind eye to Abraham’s business methods and concentrates on her art. With Moor as her model, Aurora embarks on the greatest artistic project of her life, the Moor sequence, which depicts Moor as Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada, from who the Zogoiby family claimed descent. In Bombay, Moor’s body ages quickly, but his faculties are restricted to a normal rate of growth. He falls in love with the wrong woman, whose conniving precipitates Moor’s falling out with his family.

          Banished, Moor joins with Abraham and Aurora’s political enemies, until, after Aurora’s death, he reconciles with his father. But, the reconciliation comes too late, for Moor desperately wants reconciliation with his dead mother. Nonetheless, he becomes his father’s confidant, and learns the extent of his father’s criminal empire. Events move quickly. The police close in on Abraham, and his political enemies seek to bring him down. Eventually, Moor flees, as the Bombay he knows crumbles around him. His final journey culminates in the small, mountain-top Spanish town of Benegeli, where he hopes to posthumously reconcile with his mother, and where he reunites with an old friend from his family’s past.

          Rushdie’s narrative brilliance shines in novel’s intricacies. Behind the tale lurks the palimpsest of history. Rushdie presents an India emerging from the vestiges of colonialism to become a country in the modern era. As the saga unfolds, characters dabble in communism, produce well-ridiculed scientific theories, and confront religious sectarianism. His characters exist in the world that he creates. Each character has its own mannerisms and speech. One can easily pick out Aurora’s lines by the added o’s and y’s. “Irish” da Gama, the Moor’s great-uncle, always appears accompanied by his favorite dog – whether living, or stuffed and mounted on wheels. The novel abounds in coincidence, and though some coincidences are a bit too fortuitous, they are delivered in the Rushdie fashion, with the proper amount of skepticism and unapologetic, self-consciousness that enables them to come across as narratively brilliant. The novel is well-deserving of its acclaim.

JCM

11 January 2013