The Raw And The Cooked

Making deliberately slow progress with Atwoood's The Handmaid's Tale - partly because I've been so busy at work, and at home doing work for work, and partly because I'm savouring every moment. Is this a feminist novel? The label is inadequate and reductive. This is simply a great novel: intense, emotional, yet sublimely controlled.

The problem I found reading the Danticat novel the other day lay, I think, in a sense of a lack of necessary distance in the relationship between the text and the writer. What was the reader supposed to make of the two major male characters? On one level they seem decent, understanding sorts, but it's difficult to shake off a suspicion that we're meant to see them as somehow inadequate in the face of the challenges of female pain - which is infinite, unfortunately.

At one moment Danticat outlines the awful degradation of the bodies of the two other women in the central character's therapy group. It's just two sentences, and we hardly hear of these women again. It's an awful thing to say, but I almost laughed at how over-the-top this was. What prevented me from laughing was the realisation that this kind of horror is real - but the writer has a duty, surely, to make it real for the reader. And somehow this writer, for all her talent, fails to do this too often.

Atwood never fails. Her fantasy world becomes realer than real.