The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

An excellent work of speculative fiction by an author who has demonstrated her skill in many genres, including poetry. This is a dystopia, or a utopia gone horribly wrong. The portrait of a misogynistic society where women are property, treated as mere wombs and the source of original sin. Picture radical Islam mixed with Old Testament Jewish law as interpreted by power-hungry pseudo-Christians that form a theocracy and you have the general idea.

The narrator is a "handmaid", as in the handmaid of Rachel. When Rachel could not bear Jacob a child, she offered her handmaid to her husband and then raised the resulting child as her own. Atwood takes these ideas to their extremes, imaging a plausible, if twisted society. Couple that with her excellent writing skills and you have an excellent novel that touches the reader in a number of ways.

SPOILER WARNING

As a writer myself, the ending is interesting. I suspected, having read other Atwood novels, that the ending would not be straightforward. Some readers might want revenge, violence, an end to the horrors of the society, a catharsis or healing of some kind, but none of these things happen. It's an ambiguous ending, in which we do not know if the handmaid is rescued or not. We suspect that she is, but can't be sure. There is certainly no revenge, no payback, and no interruption in the society. After the narration ends, there is an epilogue, in the form of a transcript from a scholarly conference that occurs a century or so after the events in the novel, in which a speaker discusses the discovery and authenticity of the narration we have just finished reading. Once again there are no hard facts presented, just the impression that the narrator escaped to record her story - but there are no details supplied about the fate of the society.

Not sure how I feel about the epilogue. Was it really needed? I'm fine with the ending of the narration, as ambiguous as it is, and I guess Atwood felt that something else was needed to help the reader resolve the story. Maybe that in itself is an admission that the ending of the narration is not satisfying by itself.

I highly recommend this novel - it's thought provoking and well written.