We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweat taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.1
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First Impressions?
I feel like I’ve gone to the doctor to hear my test results, and they’re sitting opposite me with an expression you only usually see undertakers wearing.
As Eminem might say about a fateful trip to the doctor:
He ain’t even gotta call you in his office to say it2
This opening stinks of grief, and of being haunted by something lost we thought would last forever. But what? What has died?
Close Reading
Here we are meeting, another unnamed first-person narrator. With the limited information available, and working only with the title the author has given us, I’m going to assume the ‘handmaid’ is speaking.
Your mileage will vary with your experience, but we can probably all agree that the term suggests some kind of subordinate or servant. As a good catholic boy, I know my Bible well enough to have a nagging feeling that handmaids appear in the Book of Genesis, but I don’t remember anything clearly enough for this cold reading.
But you can bet that like all intellectually curious students of literature, I’ll go and look it up later, to see if it adds anything. Mostly because it sounds archaic, and anachronistic in the context of the rest of this opening. It’s our first moment of estrangement, before we open the book.
For now, though, I’m too unsettled by the gymnasium to get distracted by it.
Which groups of people (noting the plural pronoun used) end up sleeping in those places?
People in trouble, that’s who.
People who can’t go home.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, flooding: these are the sorts of things I associate with the poor, dead-eyed souls I see on TV, wrapped in tin-foil blankets and sipping hot drinks from the discomfort of camp beds. So, the narrator and the rest of ‘we’ are in some way the lucky ones? Survivors from a disaster of some kind?
Then I stop for one of those, ‘wait, what?’ rewinds which are often so rewarding.
The narrator tells us, so early they almost seem to be in a rush to do so, that this ‘had once been’ gymnasium. What do you mean by that? Is it not a gymnasium now?
What has happened? Whatever it is, it must be relatively recent. The nets are gone, but the lines on the floor and the hoops remain. But games were played there ‘formerly’. I’m inferring that this is not time for games, and that those times might not return.
Those past tense terms are everywhere, and form the central spine of my reading. ‘Had once been’, ‘was’, ‘formerly’, ‘gone’. I’m not exaggerating in talking about expecting bad, bad news. Reading on is going to upset me, I feel.
Smell is a particularly evocative sense, and the narrator uses it subtly, I think, to differentiate between genders. In the context of the gymnasium and the basketball paraphernalia, I find myself associating the sweat with the players, and the chewing gum and perfume with the girls who watched them. It smacks of youth, and the arena feels like a place where both genders are on display, and showing off?
But the smells are merely imagined, ‘afterimages’, ghosts of people and ideas which are long gone now. Like the ‘pictures’ of girls in felt skirts. And I’m really impressed how in that final sentence, even cut-off as it is by our self-imposed 100 word limit, the writer performs a kind of time travel, describing the evolution of the outfits the girls would wear over a series of decades in the twentieth century.
Horribly, it reinforces the sense of change – the list of dress styles portray the building as a gymnasium over a period of generations, stretching before they were born. It feels like an entire way of life has gone, the way of life not just of more modern children, who we’ll call the ‘one earring generation’, but their parents and grandparents too. It amplifies the scale of the disaster, when the foundations underpinning life as we know it (and expect it to be in the future) have gone.
So, this obviously isn’t a gas leak or similar, where everyone can return home in a day or two with a story to tell. Something fundamental has happened. It’s affected an entire way of life, which generations took for granted, and the change has already lasted long enough for buildings to begin losing the sense of what they were before,
I think it’s worth pausing to consider why this feels so dystopian, closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than, say, Rebecca, or Gatsby did earlier in the series.
Orwell gave us a full name for his protagonist, but here, as there, I feel no connection to the main character. Too much has happened, evidently – this is societal change which is being described, not a person simply having a crap day. I don’t know anything, really, about this narrator and in all honesty, right now I don’t much care. As a reader, my need is to orientate myself, to understand how it is different, how worse than the here and now.
Maybe then I can begin to focus on individuals.
Right now, I’m waiting for the bad news. I know it’s bad, but please, just spit it out. Not knowing is infinitely worse than knowing. Tell me what’s happened, and I can begin to grieve, and try to adjust to the new normal, whatever that is.
As you read on, look for:
The author’s use of ‘exposition’ – what we get told, how, and when. Does the writer continue keeping us worried and confused?
Our relationship with the narrator – right now, they seem more of a guide to this new world than someone we’re invited to get close to.
How the writer uses time – there’s a strong sense of ‘then’ and ‘now’ in the opening. But the balance seems very much on the past, not the present
Close reading lies at the heart of successful Literature studies.
The ability to analyse language, structure, and narrative choices with precision underpins the highest marks across all major exam boards. If you’d like to develop those skills with one-to-one support, you can find out more about tuition here. https://a-levelenglishlit.uk/tuition_and_faqs/
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