Book review: The Handmaid's Wail

Dead famous, but also dead boring². The surface veneer is tolerable: La Atwood has clearly been to writer's school and learnt how to write words¹, but they forgot the bit about writing an interesting story; or perhaps that bit isn't teachable. There is a colourless cloying pallid dry dusty silence spreading over the prose⁴; this contrasts with, say, Moby Dick - another wildly popular-in-the-lists book that no-one except me ever reads - which at least has some salt and colour to its language and vigour to its speach. Proust can also be boring; but unlike LA, Marcel rewards you in the end with beauty. As well as some fascinating insights into the culture of his times. LA has no interesting insights into culture to offer, because her culture is entirely made up and not at all plausible³.

The woke left lap this stuff up because it is trying to be nasty to the religious right. And yet - as the epilogue obliquely admits - the target is really muslim society, of the Saudi / Iranian type; though naturally LA isn't brave enough to say this out loud: there are no plaudits from the left for saying that kind of thing. And although nominally about the evils of patriarchy, in fact most of the oppression is by women.

My edition has an Introduction, nominally by Naomi Alderman, which I hoped might be enlightening; but alas I rapidly discovered that it had been written by a Fembot-type AI given the prompt "say bad but implausible things about the USA and lay it on as thick as you can: these people aren't thinking". Oh, and lastly and trivially: this isn't sci-fi; it is politics.

Refs

* Trump's Iran War Continues to Violate the Constitution - and Now Also the War Powers Act of 1973 (see-also Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs)

Notes

1. But see this review.

2. Confession - with which I had originally meant to open this review - I knew before reading the book that I was going to dislike it; nothing about the reading of it gave me cause to change my opinion. Partly because mainstream writers trying to write sci-fi is always painful; partly because it isn't sci-fi; partly because of the strain I knew would be there.

3. Leading - as this review says - to the reader being unable to suspend disbelief.

4. Towards the end the protagonist apologises for - I forget the exact terms - not being interesting, not being active, enough. This may resonate with progressive female youth-du-jour, if what one reads in the papers is true; though I lack contact with any such and so cannot say from personal experience.