I really, really like the Handmaids tale book series, i am currently getting through the second book, the testaments and i have a need to locate the third.
The thing is, with these books, is that it both seems so absurd yet once you think about how politics are going right now, very truthful in a twisted way
“Commander Judd had refused to operate when an unbaby ( a baby born with defects due to the environmental toxcity)got lodged in the birth canal. Nothing could be done, he said piously, because it still had a heartbeat.”
This should not reflect at all what is happening in the modern world, even as this excract is from the testaments, written in 2019 by the glorious Margaret Atwood, and not from the original Handmaids tale written in 1985.
So far the series has had such an uncomfortable amount of paralells with modern society, all the while still being very fanatical in its delivery, and during the abortion rights protests in America many women wore the traditional red dresses of the handmaids as, with lack of a better explanation for it, have to go through state sanctioned rape and have to bring the baby to term just because they have had relations with more than one man or just commiting a crime like stealing or *gasp* reading. More often than not, the babies come out deformed and if they do come out healthy, the handmaid often dies and is forgotten almost immediately. They are stripped of their names and called Of(whatever man owns her) such as Ofkyle, Offred, Ofglen etc.
The whole messed up political structure intrigues me a lot as well, women arent allowed to read , except for the Aunts who become treasure troves of information, and it is said that the weak of mind can not become aunts because what they learn once they go through their training at Ardua hall throws their perception of life, spoon fed to them by the government, on its head.
For they preach God and that God looks upon men like his equals but when Agnes and Bertha read the Bible, they find out that God says that he looks upon all his creations equally, something they only thought happened in death.
The way that she describes how people who could not stand these paralells with what they have been taught to belive and what is true is painful to read as Atwood shows how many commited suicide or have tried due to their hopelessness.
In the first book there is even a whole subplot about how Moira, Offred’s friend before she became a handmaid, was a lesbian and captured and there is a lo about how she escaped the system and is still eventually caught.
