One Quote Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

My first Margaret Atwood book. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect 1984. This is thought provoking novel but it won’t make you feel lovely and gooey inside. In fact, while an interesting proposition, it comes out perhaps as a dull finished product. I’m not saying it needs some ninjas and an alien, but the novel is largely inside someone’s head.

America is taken over by some quasi-Christian cult. Their Ayatollah style regime is obsessed with fertility. The handmaids are women who failed to meet the strict moral regulations and are trained to be nothing more than birthing tanks.

One of the most dreadful passages, in the sense of evoking dread, takes place when the protagonist is out for her daily walk:

At the corner is the store known as Soul Scrolls. It’s a franchise: there are Soul Scrolls in every city center, in every suburb, or so they say. It must make a lot of profit.

The window of Soul Scrolls is shatterproof. Behind it are printout machines, row on row of them; these machines are known as Holy Rollers, but only among us, it’s a disrespectful nickname. What the machines print is prayers, roll upon roll, prayers going out endlessly. They’re ordered by Compuphone, I’ve overheard the Commander’s Wife doing it. Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is supposed to be a sign of piety and faithfulness to the regime, so of course the Commanders’ Wives do it a lot. It helps their husbands’ careers.

There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.

The machines talk as they print out the prayers; if you like, you can go inside and listen to them, the toneless metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over. Once the prayers have been printed out and said, the paper rolls back through another slot and is recycled into fresh paper again. There are no people inside the building: the machines run by themselves. You can’t hear the voices from outside; only a murmur, a hum, like a devout crowd, on its knees.

Your Correspondent, Almost always does a whole-arsed job of it.