Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale has become ‘increasingly plausible’

Margaret Atwood has said that the plot of her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells the story of an authoritarian regime under which women are forced to reproduce, has become “increasingly plausible” in recent years.

Atwood said on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that she believed the plot was “crazy” when she first developed the concept for the novel, because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.

“It was the land of the free… and people in Europe just didn’t believe it could ever happen like that,” she said.

“I’ve always been someone who has never believed that it can’t happen here. It can happen anywhere, given the circumstances.”

When asked about the book’s enduring popularity, Atwood told the show’s host Lauren Laverne, “Well, it’s a perpetual possibility, right? Then in 2016, everything changed again, and we’re now in that period where The Handmaid’s Tale has gotten much closer.”

“Not the outfits. I don’t think we’re going to get the outfits, but the rest is looking more and more likely.”

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and tells the story of a totalitarian and fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead, which takes power in the US and subjugates women who are forced to become slaves and bear children. The novel was dramatized in a TV series in 2017 starring American actor Elisabeth Moss.

The red cloaks worn by the handmaids have become a symbol of American protest against Donald Trump and the decision to overturn the Roe v Wade ruling on abortion.

“These kinds of regimes don’t last, in part because they become unsustainable. This particular regime seems quite chaotic,” Atwood said.

“Let’s not leave out America either. First of all, it is much more diverse than it seems from a distance. Secondly, Americans are quite vulgar.

“They don’t like people telling them that they all have to line up and do what they’re told. They really don’t like that, but they don’t like being bossed around by anyone, right or left.”

Atwood’s follow-up story, The Testaments, was co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. In an interview with the Guardian in November, she said that the very fact that filming on the novel’s first season had just finished was a testament to hope for the US.

“The States are not yet totalitarianism,” she said. “Although we are moving towards a structure of concentrated power. If it were complete totalitarianism, we wouldn’t be filming The Testaments at all. We would be in prison, in exile or dead.”