The Handmaid's Tale: There's nothing "timely" or even plausible about this yarn

We are all necessarily prisoners of our own place and time, and thus, I was in my youth necessarily a fan of "The Handmaid's Tale." I read it; I discussed it earnestly with like-minded friends; I copied author Margaret Atwood's muted style and dystopian preoccupations in my own, less competent fiction.

But youth has fled, alas; it has been two decades since I last picked up my copy of the book. Even that copy — paperback, dog-eared, water-stained and threatening to come apart at the spine — has been left behind somewhere, presumably the same place I lost my velvet chokers and my Suzanne Vega CDs.

However, a new TV show has been made out of the book, and is attracting rave reviews, less for its acting, script or stunning visuals than for its "unexpectedly timely" message.

Nonsense.

Whatever future we should fear Donald Trump will usher in, it will bear precious little resemblance to Atwood's Gilead.

But people keep saying the TV adaptation of "The Handmaid's Tale" is unexpectedly timely in this age. Perhaps I had forgotten some Trumpian intimations from the text. So I reread the book. To try to get as close to the original experience as possible, I listened to Suzanne Vega on Spotify.

Alas, my household does not contain anything that may safely substitute for a velvet choker.

It is as though someone had read "Brave New World," gone to modern Pyongyang, and shouted: "You see! This is just what Huxley was warning about!" Um, not really.

My quarrel is not with the politics of "The Handmaid's Tale," nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area. Of the dystopian fiction I've read, only "1984" comes even remotely close to feeling real, and that's because Orwell was working from two vivid contemporaneous examples, from which he lifted freely.

Fictional dystopia is sort of the photo negative of the movies produced by actual totalitarian regimes. Masses of people wearing identical creepy clothes, forming into precise lines, chanting the same things. Yes, in regimes like North Korea and Hitler's Germany, those mass rallies occur. The men march and the girls dance in eerily infinite lines. But afterward, most of them go home to the banal, the ordinary, and the familiar — altered by political fear and economic shortages, but not wholly transformed into something unrecognizably inhuman.

In interviews since its publication, Atwood has emphasized that all the details in the book were based on things that really happened in the world (or at least, are recounted in tales; the "handmaids" of the book, concubines given to elite men of Gilead's theocracy in order to bear them the children their barren wives could not, is based on the story of Rachel and Jacob in the Book of Genesis). One sees the historical referents when reading, and yet the entire effect is completely unrealistic, because she's drawn details from too many oppressive regimes and collaged them.

Dystopian regimes in real life have common features, yes, but they are not actually interchangeable; indeed, they are surprisingly specific. Reading accounts of those actual regimes, I'm always surprised at how culturally embedded they remained, even as they proclaimed that they were enacting a new world order in which everything would be different.

Nor could such a movement gain power here along the lines that Atwood outlines. I've seen her praised for actually thinking through the mechanism by which her fictional state might emerge, and kudos for the effort, but we must also acknowledge that, as written, it doesn't really make much sense.

The inciting event is a lightly fictionalized version of the Reichstag fire, but a careful student of history would note that a decade after the Reichstag fire, most of German society still looked pretty much like it had in 1925. No, I'm not excusing Nazi atrocities in any way, shape or form, nor discounting the sweeping changes that Hitler did make. But they didn't gut-renovate the economy, wipe out all religions that competed with the state, and completely reorganize society in the space of a few years; they left much of the economy and the culture alone.

For structural reasons — she needs her handmaid to remember the "world before" as an adult, and yet still be young enough to be fertile — Atwood needs changes that are both unrealistically sweeping and ludicrously fast.

She is not illustrating how Trump will transform America.

America hasn't had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump.

And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the GOP stronghold where Trump had the greatest trouble.

Critics seem to have failed to notice that Trump has been unable to usher in even the far more limited changes he promised, such as dramatically restricting immigration, reshaping NATO and bringing foreign governments to heel. He hasn't got control of Congress, or the courts, and has nothing like the mass movements behind him that brought other dystopian governments to power, whether fascist, communist or theocratic.

Meanwhile, the culture is moving the other way. Women are gaining more economic power relative to men; the nation is becoming less religious.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is becoming less plausible a future with each passing year — no matter how hard feminists insist that there is only a brief and slippery slope between overturning Roe vs. Wade and forcing women into state-sanctioned breeding programs.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality.