I first read this novel many moons ago when I was about 18 years old. My eyes are so different now.
Many people know the basic story. It's a semi post-apocalyptic story where the civilization of Gilean has instituted martial law. Women have lost all rights. They can't have jobs, control money, or survive on their own. Not only that, they have been reduced to their reproductive potential. Wives are generally married to important men and barren, Martha's are women who are useful but can't reproduce and take care of homes, handmaids have viable ovaries and have sex with husbands trying to give barren wives children. Creeptastic. The women have little if any communication with one another, resentment is rampant, and everyone is afraid. It's only been four years - all of these women remember the time before.
Offred, the protagonist, is a handmaid in the home of a Commander (of what she does not know) who clearly remembers her life before. The story vacillates between her current day horror and the year or so leading up to marital law: the day her accounts were frozen, the day she lost her job, the day she and her husband tried to run with their daughter. As I sit typing this, reeling over "criminal miscarriage" legislation, it's creepier than ever.
This book does an amazing job of many things. One is, it demonstrates the loneliness of all the women, cut off from each other, reduced to function, in a way that is heart breaking. Imagine the relief in speaking in full sentences in your normal tone of voice. Can you even. Or imagine having, after four years, to make yourself think about spelling again. Atwood's portrayal of how basic skills are lost with disuse is mind boggling and probably true. Atwood's protagonist spends most of her time trying not to think, concentrating on the simplest things: a fingernail, a cloud. Without even thought to keep you company, the world is very lonely place, even in close quarters.
Offred eventually gets an opportunity to expand her life a little. The Commander involves her in life outside the house - either as an act of mercy or one of control, your reading may vary - and Offred begins to want again. To feel what it is to have power, no matter how limited. She takes risks, albeit calculated risks. Most importantly she starts to think again. Not just remember, but process, create in her mind, plan. I guess that's suppose to be the uplifting part.
There are a lot of moments in this book that suck the wind out of you and not all of them are what you'd expect. The sex act in this culture is it's own special kind of sickness must it's not the most sickening moment, at least not for this reader. There are many others, in the women who help to control other women, the betrayal among those who have no choice but to trust, etc etc. The most frightening moment for this reader though, comes in the middle of the narrative, Offred is remembering the early days when things began to change - she is bereft, afraid, already losing herself and in a moment of clarity that changes everything, she realizes her husband doesn't mind. What, if anything, can a subjected population do if even their allies are complacent?
CBR #9 - A Star Called Henry
Henry Smart has had a hell of a time. This is the first book in a trilogy (of which I read the third first) by Roddy Doyle. It follows the life of Henry Smart from his earliest years in Dublin during the Troubles to his retirement from the IRA. Henry is the first child to survive, in a family that would have been immense, born to impovershed parents in Dublin. His father is a bouncer at the local whore house and sometimes heavy man for the local gangster. His mother is aging five years for every one at home with the ghosts of her children who didn't survive.
Little Henry first hits the streets at age 3 and is already mean. He grows up on the streets, leaving home with his little brother in tow by the time he is 8. His Mother is incapable of caring for them and his father has run off, or died, either way it's two little boys on the streets. At first, being a middle class American born in the late twentieth century this seems hard to believe, but Doyle's writing is so convincing that even I can picture it painful as it is.
Henry eventually gets off the streets and into hiding as an early soldier in the IRA, he has what Cusack called "a certain moral flexibility" and it gains him position in the burgeoning army. Henry works hard, falls in love, commits murders, runs and runs and runs. All the while he maintains a sense of humor and loyalty to his cause. Until he can't anymore. And then he just absolutely cannot. The plot description doesn't do this book justice.
I don't know much about the troubles or the IRA honestly, although I'm enamored by it. This novel hints at the strategies of the IRA and how they were successful in ways that require that I do some research and see if they're true (I love that in a novel). Did the IRA really draw the English intentionally into peaceful neighborhoods and trick them into wreaking havoc, murdering citizens, in order that public opinion turn against them? Did the IRA knowingly sacrifice their own when it suited them, or defend their own for crimes equal to any British peeler?
Whether intentional or not, this novel manages to maintain the romance, on some level, of the Irish Independence movement; however, at the same time it is a gripping narrative about the use and abuse of those that served. Men like Henry with nothing to lose carry a revolution on their backs until slowly one by one they are betrayed, disillusioned, or killed. As Henry goes about his work, he slowly comes to realize that he is little more than a beast of burden for a movement whose intentions may have been true, but whose execution, in the end, is wanting.
The narrative voice is so strong and so compelling that the story comes across much more intensely and ferociously than this review would suggest. It has moments of bone crushing sadness and pure elation. Henry is a brute, but you love him, as you're suppose to, even when you know he is wrong.
Little Henry first hits the streets at age 3 and is already mean. He grows up on the streets, leaving home with his little brother in tow by the time he is 8. His Mother is incapable of caring for them and his father has run off, or died, either way it's two little boys on the streets. At first, being a middle class American born in the late twentieth century this seems hard to believe, but Doyle's writing is so convincing that even I can picture it painful as it is.
Henry eventually gets off the streets and into hiding as an early soldier in the IRA, he has what Cusack called "a certain moral flexibility" and it gains him position in the burgeoning army. Henry works hard, falls in love, commits murders, runs and runs and runs. All the while he maintains a sense of humor and loyalty to his cause. Until he can't anymore. And then he just absolutely cannot. The plot description doesn't do this book justice.
I don't know much about the troubles or the IRA honestly, although I'm enamored by it. This novel hints at the strategies of the IRA and how they were successful in ways that require that I do some research and see if they're true (I love that in a novel). Did the IRA really draw the English intentionally into peaceful neighborhoods and trick them into wreaking havoc, murdering citizens, in order that public opinion turn against them? Did the IRA knowingly sacrifice their own when it suited them, or defend their own for crimes equal to any British peeler?
Whether intentional or not, this novel manages to maintain the romance, on some level, of the Irish Independence movement; however, at the same time it is a gripping narrative about the use and abuse of those that served. Men like Henry with nothing to lose carry a revolution on their backs until slowly one by one they are betrayed, disillusioned, or killed. As Henry goes about his work, he slowly comes to realize that he is little more than a beast of burden for a movement whose intentions may have been true, but whose execution, in the end, is wanting.
The narrative voice is so strong and so compelling that the story comes across much more intensely and ferociously than this review would suggest. It has moments of bone crushing sadness and pure elation. Henry is a brute, but you love him, as you're suppose to, even when you know he is wrong.
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