Margaret Atwood often says that everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has essentially happened at some point in history—she didn’t have to make much up.
She is quoted on the cover of Miriam Toews’s new novel, Women Talking,which is also based on a real incident that is laid plain on the opening page: In a Mennonite colony not long ago, the men used animal anesthetic to knock out and attack the women and girls, who would wake with broken bodies and no memory of what had happened. God was blamed, so was the devil.
As in life, the fictional women in these pages are illiterate, they can’t use a map, and they have no idea what the world is like outside the colony. They gather in a hayloft over two nights to discuss what they have learned—it wasn’t God, it wasn’t Satan, it was the men—and what is to be done. Do they stay to punish the men? If so, how? Or do they flee? If so, how? What is the cutoff age for sons who get to come along, and whose sons must be left behind? Is staying or leaving the greater sin? Is their understanding of sin even accurate, since it has been conveyed to them by the men who’ve been taught to read? The entire novel is just this, the women’s discussion, over two long days. They must reach their decision before the men return home.
A hapless young man in love with Ona, who is pregnant from the attacks, takes minutes of the meeting at Ona’s request. Not always sure what he should and should not record, he attempts to record everything: the infighting, the lucid counterpoints, the way one woman, Agata, laughs by moving her upper body “to the left, to the right, to the left, a subtle dance she performs when she appreciates a joke, indicating she gets it, it’s a good one.” PLEASE READ
Women Talking by Miriam Toews, from Bloomsbury
