Author’s Version of Church and State as One

Margaret Atwood says she spent three years trying to ignore the mental images she kept having of 21st-Century American life under a far right, evangelical banner. But the compelling pictures and ideas wouldn’t go away. Finally, Atwood gathered her courage and wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Houghton Mifflin Co.: $16.95).

“I knew perfectly well that some people were going to say, ‘Isn’t this outrageous?’ ‘Didn’t it all come out of your warped imagination?’ and ‘My, you must be a pretty kinky person!’ I felt that it was a bit too crazy. I even tried to start another book, something upbeat and jolly. But the earlier book kept getting into it . . . I’m a cowardly person,” she admitted with a wry grin.

The powerful ideas Atwood couldn’t run away from snared readers as well. Within two weeks of its February publication date, “The Handmaid’s Tale” had vaulted onto every major best-seller list in the country. “I’m thrilled that it’s being taken seriously,” said Atwood, a 46-year-old Canadian whose pale, heart-shaped face is framed by a profusion of brown curls.

Terrorist Coup

Her new novel takes place in Gilead, a neo-Puritan dictatorship, after religious fundamentalists have executed a “holy” terrorist coup that liquidates the President and congressional leadership. The Caucasian birthrate has sunk far below replacement level, due to toxic pollutants, radiation accidents and an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. The society’s paramount value is human reproduction, so every woman finds herself forced into a specific role that’s determined by fertility or lack of it. Men, too, are separated into castes by their worth to the church and state, now joined.

In Gilead’s ardent search for the Holy Grail of new life, birth control, abortion and homosexual acts are all hanging crimes. Most civil liberties have been suspended--subsumed to the state’s higher evangelical mission. Evening TV news clips show raids that retrieve hidden sacred objects from the homes of Jews, 21st-Century Marranos who resist secretly, like their forbears in 15th-Century Spain.

Commanders of the Faithful, an older, quasi-military corps of leaders, rule this theocracy. Each commander has his own Handmaid, charged with producing a healthy child in a three-year time span. The “breeders” are restricted to their tiny rooms except for daily food-shopping trips with another woman and occasional state-sponsored group ceremonies. Atwood’s narrator, Offred, is a highly intelligent 33-year-old “breeder,” a transitional woman who remembers freer times and is determined to survive entrapment in this airless world. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is her story.

‘Cautionary Tale’

Atwood, who visited here on a promotional tour, called her book “a cautionary tale,” a preview of a world that could spring from seeds that exist today but aren’t likely to flower until harder times. “People manipulate other people politically through fear and hard times. ‘If we don’t do this, look what’s going to happen.’ ” She pointed to the declining Anglo birth-rate, rising sterility and birth defects, panic about AIDS’ potentially rapid spread. These trends loom against a backdrop of evangelical religion’s surging popularity and marriage to conservative politics, its leaders’ astute use of TV to garner converts along with vast amounts of money, their willingness to blur the Constitutional boundaries between church and state.

“In hard times you can put in more repressive regimes because people will feel that stringent measures are called for to get us out of the hard times. If people become too frightened and appalled at how things are going, they begin to feel that certain limitations on individual freedom are called for. At that point, a group like the Commanders could seize power without the kind of opposition they’d have if they tried it tomorrow,” Atwood said.

This political fable is a new genre for the Harvard-educated Toronto writer, author of five novels and 19 volumes of nonfiction, short stories and poetry. “You never can predict what’s going to happen when you venture into territory that’s unknown. It’s scary,” she said. “But once I got going, I found it was tremendously exhilarating. There weren’t very many slow moments, and I didn’t find myself walking up too many blind alleys. It went at a great clip.”

‘The Proper Atmosphere’

Atwood began the novel in West Berlin on a German typewriter with a keyboard as unfamiliar as the book’s format. “Berlin does have a wall all the way around it, so it was the proper atmosphere to begin in. And there’s a feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next while you’re inside the wall. The Berliners seem to get used to it, but it feels surreal.” She finished the book last spring during a visiting professor stint in Alabama.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is not meant to be a prophetic blueprint of our future, Atwood said, but rather a freeze-frame of one place we could arrive at along the path we’re traveling. “I want people to look where they’re going.”

For 14 years, Atwood has lived with novelist Graeme Gibson, and they share care of their 9-year-old daughter Jess--an arrangement that’s helped to keep Atwood in high gear professionally without sacrificing the comforts of home. Like a mounting number of professional women, she became a mother for the first time in her mid-30s. “I was already fairly secure in myself and my career. I very much wanted to have this child. I had saved up for it--emotionally and financially.”

Finding It Rough

Parenting changed not only her home life but influenced the writing, too. “After becoming a mother, you discover that you have more ferociousness in you than you might have suspected,” she said. Some of the most powerful passages in her novel convey the grief of a mother forcibly severed from her young child. Fanciful? News correspondents tell us about the kidnapped children turning up in Argentine generals’ homes now, Atwood pointed out. And there were the blonde Polish children during the Holocaust, appropriated by the Nazis, who permanently “disappeared” into proper Aryan homes. “That’s one of the things that repressive regimes do--they break up families,” Atwood said.

Atwood is finding it rough to cope with even a brief break-up of her own family. This semester she’s the Berg Visiting Professor of English at New York University. She’s left Jess back in Toronto, involved with piano, tap dance and karate lessons, Gibson on the child-care front. There are also his 25- and 23-year-old sons from a previous marriage. “They’ve recently elected to drop out of ‘the dropout generation’ and go back to school, so they live with us, too,” Atwood said. She sees her family on weekends, talks by phone every day and still misses them.

A future alive with children extends beyond the black tunnel of a world portrayed in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she pointed out. Her story closes with a historical epilogue, an academic symposium circa 2195 that dissects, with droll humor, the now-defunct Gilead society. People live on after Gilead. Indeed, Atwood’s spirited narrator gets a shot at escape, thanks to the Underground. “Even under repressive regimes, there’s always a black market, and there’s always an Underground and there’s usually a potential way out,” Atwood observed. Her heroine gets the ticket out only because she cannot shed her (apparently) dysfunctional human needs: At mortal risk, she forms a spontaneous emotional tie with a man she has no good reason to trust. This honest but dangerous bond ultimately gives Offred at least a chance at a future.

Atwood’s future plans are about as vague as her heroine’s. “I have several ideas for books, but I had several ideas before I started this one, too . . . I just wait until an idea becomes so compelling that it can’t be avoided. I’m essentially quite a lazy person,” she said cheerfully. “I put things off, so it has to be an idea that’s strong enough to overcome my own inertia.” One sure thing: After giving an office at home a try, she’s moving back out again. “It’s just not working. The phone rings too much, people walk in the door, they think if you’re home, you’re free. I need to separate myself from the house, where a snack and a cup of tea are always too available.”

Atwood prides herself on the research she does for her novels, evident in such earlier books as “Life Before Man” and “Bodily Harm.” Fearful that critics would dismiss “The Handmaid’s Tale” as far-fetched, she began to gather a few historical references and newspaper articles to prove that similar events had taken place. In the last two years, her clippings have expanded into a mountain of hard data. Bizarre, harsh and unthinkable as its premise appears, “The Handmaid’s Tale” now has reality itself as its star defense witness, Atwood said. “It turns out I didn’t put anything in this book that human beings haven’t already shown themselves quite capable of doing. Either they’ve done it before, or they’re doing it now. Nothing in the book is outside the range of human possibility.”