Author: wordledger
There are few books out there that pack a punch quite like this one. The possibility of it all, the plausibility. There are small moments only, in which the severity of it can’t be fathomed.
Dystopian tales are everywhere these days. They’ve been around for decades, centuries even, but were arguably kicked off in earnest for our generation with The Hunger Games. The Handmaid’s Tale was published several decades earlier, and yet I feel it is an immensely important read – both for me as a writer and as a human being.
How do you control a gender? One method that has been around for millennia is the guise of protection. Or the removal of education. Money.
How do you change a society, a culture, all at once and to the extreme? How do you write something contrary to what is known and lived, turning a strong, able-minded, thinking being into a passive follower? For those of us (women) living in the western world, we have rights, we have education. We can largely protect ourselves, make our own money and attain whatever luxuries or freedoms we may want. And yet, the possibility this book represents doesn’t seem outrageous, impossible or even unthinkable. The Handmaid’s Tale is immensely compelling, brilliant and terrifying.
It’s a dystopia, yes, but unlike other dystopian tales I’ve read of late, The Handmaid’s Tale presents something immediately plausible. And as such, I think it’s an excellent example of just how impressive and effective a dystopian tale can be. They don’t need to be literary works of art, though this one certainly is. They just need to take something familiar to illuminate something sinister currently present in our society.
There are two questions I believe are critical to dystopian writing:
- What do we need to survive?
- How do we currently use or squander it?
There are so many ways in which the Handmaid’s Tale flays our current existence and demonstrates how tenuous our struggles have been, how small our victories, and how fragile our stance. We live forever on a knife’s edge, we revel in it, and a writer has the beautiful opportunity to play with what might happen if we were to tip over the edge.
So do it. Play with what can be. Take something crucial, or seemingly crucial, out of existence and see where it leads you. Dystopian tales offer commentary on our society in a far more illustrative way than other genres. If civilisation, or the illusion thereof, remains, but the foundations of what enabled it are lost, what then?
The Handmaid’s Tale inspired in me a need to explore these questions further. It may well do the same for you. If this is something you’re already contemplating, I strongly encourage you to read this book and find the nuances that make this protagonist and her situation so distressing. Answering the need for a changed perspective, one that is at once familiar and completely foreign, is one of the sincerest and most distinct requirements for a significant, fathomable dystopia. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Other dystopian tales I enjoyed:
wordledger 