Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale has become ‘more and more plausible’ | Margaret Atwood

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

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

“This was the land of the free… and people in Europe didn’t believe it could go on like this,” he said.

“I’ve always been someone who never believed it could happen here. It could 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, isn’t it? Then in 2016 everything changed again, and now we’re in a period where The Handmaid’s Tale has become much closer.”

“Not the clothes. I don’t think we can get the clothes, but the rest is looking more and more reasonable.”

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and tells the story of a totalitarian, fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead that took over the United States and subjugated women who were forced to become slaves and bear children. The novel was dramatized in a television series in 2017, starring US actor Elisabeth Moss.

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

“Such regimes don’t last long, partly because they become unsustainable. This one in particular looks quite chaotic,” Atwood said.

“Also, let’s not take into account America. First of all, it is much more diverse than it seems from afar. Secondly, Americans are quite cranky.

“They don’t like it when people tell them all to fall in line and do as they’re told. They really don’t like it, but they don’t like it when anyone, left or right, bosses them around.”

Atwood’s follow-up story, The Testaments, was joint winner of the 2019 Booker prize. In an interview with the Guardian in November, he said the fact that the novel’s first season had just finished shooting was evidence of hope for the United States.

“The states are not yet a totalitarian regime,” he said. “Although we’re moving towards a concentrated power structure. If it were total totalitarianism, we wouldn’t have filmed The Testament at all. We’d be in prison, exile, or dead.”