The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)

Why this one?

This is my first deviation from the routine of reading every Booker Prize winner in order. Literally the first book I’ve read in over a year that hasn’t won the Booker! Wow. I was intending on leaving this mad treat for a few weeks hence, when hopefully I’ll have completed the full task. However, with 2019’s The Testaments up next on my reading list, it felt worth revisiting the novel to which it’s a sequel. I’ll be carrying on the blog in a more informal fashion after finishing the run of winners, with various strands essentially based around stuff I want to read - I’ll certainly be taking a break from the Booker as a whole but will be dipping back in now and then to look at some of the shortlisted novels that didn’t win.

Regardless of its sequel becoming a winner of the Prize, this would have been high up my list of books to cover. It was beaten to the 1986 Prize by Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils, which looks highly likely to earn the dubious honour of being my least favourite Booker winner. This, on the other hand, is part of the cultural fabric. How could it not have won?? I wanted to check in again and see if there were any clues.

NB: I’m not planning to repeat the elaborate format I’ve been using for the winners in these side-articles. For the context of the time, jump back to the original 1986 piece.

Thoughts, etc.

The Handmaid’s Tale, for anyone who’s been living under a rock and is somehow not familiar with its plot, is essentially the tale of a dystopian, totalitarian version of the USA, known as Gilead, seen through the eyes of one of its presumably millions of ordinary female victims - Offred - who, as one of the diminishing number of fertile women in an aggressively patriarchal society, is assigned to the role of “handmaid”, essentially a house-slave of her “commander” whose sole purpose is to bear him and his wife a child.

It’s a masterful novel, stark in its descriptions of how rapidly what was once unthinkable can become normal, of how ordinary people are both rendered impotent by and become complicit in the regimes they live under, and in its obvious reflections of the world that birthed it. The epilogue, in the form of a “historical note” from the distant future, cements what is relatively obvious throughout: Gilead was not an unprecedented novelty, or an aberration, but a distillation of many disturbing trends that existed in the real world at the time of writing. Many of which, despite the years in between and the shifting geopolitics of the world, far from disappearing, have become ever more visible and apparent.

The Handmaid’s Tale, of course, has sat (alongside other dystopian classics) as a perennial reminder of what horrors might be around the corner if enough of the many disturbing threads of the modern world coalesce in the right (wrong?) place at the right time. It’s clearly no coincidence that when the world once again began to fall into the grips of aggressively male strands of populism in the 2010s, that this prophetic (or should that just be observant?) novel came back into the focus of horrified onlookers around the world, via a prestige TV series, the aforementioned sequel, and as a visual symbol of protests against where we appeared to be, once more, heading.

Was the mood in 1986, of the world and of the Booker judges, quite so urgently focused on the important messages within Atwood’s novel as a modern day panel might be? Honest answer, I was three years old, so I have no idea. But it still seems tough to believe that its message didn’t feel at least slightly troubling in the late Cold-War period of the mid-80s. It does feel very much like a year where the judges’ priority was to honour a legend of literature for producing a funny, comforting, popular novel in what were evidently his twilight years. So perhaps a dark, troubling and feminist alarm bell of a novel never really stood a chance.

Margaret in 1986, with Dolly Parton: because why not?

Score

9.5

Up there with best of the Booker Prize winners, in a year in which I scored the (undoubtedly popular, but not to my taste) The Old Devils a rather sad 4 /10.

(I doubt whether in any of my future reads of shortlisted non-winners there’ll be such a dramatic discrepancy between the vanquished and the victor!)

Next up

I will actually be getting on to The Testaments, as promised last time. My hunch is that its position as a shared winner in 2019 was largely as a “sorry, we got it wrong” for 1986 (shafting Bernadine Evaristo in the process), but regardless I’m looking forward to revisiting Gilead as I head into the home straight of my Booker challenge…