What are the most unnerving elements in the new — and stunningly good — version of Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale? It’s an American TV rendition of a Canadian vision of an American future. Petrifying in general, it is creepy in its particulars.

First, there’s red. Young women in the Republic of Gilead wear long red gowns as fertility emblems, also because red is easier to spot should a Handmaid try to run for it. When a Handmaid kneels, the garments spill like blood on the green lawns of Gilead.

Red, a perfectly cheerful colour, now seems six kinds of sinister, and I’m saying that after Trump’s red Make America Great Again baseball caps became markers of violent idiocy.

Then there’s white. The Handmaids wear starched white bonnets with arched caps that block hearing and work as horse-blinders to destroy peripheral vision. They can’t look another Handmaid in the eye and whisper in secret solidarity, and can’t have their bodies and faces easily viewed. The caps are like a surgery screen. You can’t see your body being cut into but the doctors can.

This then reminds me of Dr. George Doodnaught, the anesthesiologist at North York General Hospital who sexually assaulted 21 female patients as they were undergoing surgery. It’s an apt metaphor but a horrible one, another in a list of #VeryHandmaidsTale news stories.

Are you feeling unwell? I am. Perhaps I’m searching for current horrors to mitigate Gilead’s predicted ones.

Atwood is at her most powerful when her suggestions are calmly made. “I hold your hand,/ which probably detaches at the wrist.” “You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/ A fish hook/ An open eye.” Those are lines from Atwood’s poetry. Canadians are so dry, so understated.

With Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson in Mad Men), Atwood really puts the hook in, not to mention slapping Moss in an alarming cameo. (That’s nothing. Atwood, one of my favourite humans, once hurt me badly by pinching me hard in the ears. It was an interview massage, no harm intended, but the woman has the grasp of a red-tailed hawk.)

The names are wonderful. Our heroine is Offred, meaning the property of a Commander named Fred. Think of Ivanka Trump as Ofdonald.

I have the same question for Atwood that I would have had for that other great prescient novelist, Doris Lessing, who wrote decades ago about a huge unattended generation of old people and African populations heading north to escape drought. How did you know?

Atwood knew that women would torment female victims in Gilead — like the peppy Republican women of Fox — just as Lessing wrote in The Cleft that a world run only by women wouldn’t work out.

But how did Atwood predict that someone like Trump could take over, that women’s genitals and uteri would become the obsession of pale stick men like Vice-President Mike Pence who will only dine alone with his wife Ofmike? The Pences made such arduous efforts to conceive that they were almost Handmaid-like, Slate reports.

“I’m not someone who has ever believed ‘It can’t happen here,’” Atwood told the audience at a screening at Innis College at the University of Toronto on Wednesday. Anything can happen. She refers to the childhood game of tangled multicoloured Pickup Sticks, “where if you move one stick, all the sticks move.”

In 1978, an Afghan coup took place that led to everything, a Soviet invasion, an American-led invasion, Iraq wars, then Arab discontent, then Syria, then ISIS. Was Afghanistan the original pickup stick that led to Trump and a possible American Gilead?

Does it even matter in Atwood terms? The most striking thing about Handmaid is that, as Atwood always points out, there is nothing in it that hasn’t happened at some point in human history. Child-stealing is an old human habit. The Salem witch trials, the dropoff in human fertility, the male need to control female sexuality, women’s betrayal of other women, these are all true stories.

Atwood no longer owned the TV rights to her book, but she was a consultant on the Hulu version, which you can watch on Bravo on April 30. It remains true to the novel although the present of 1984, when the book was first begun, has become 2017. Online complaints have already reached Atwood. They read “Liberal bulls---!” she tells the audience happily.

Is Gilead imminent? Will Americans flee to Canada, if we are still worth fleeing to?

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The TV production is admirably restrained. Instead of the gun gore of most cable TV productions, there are hints of horror: black vans prowling, a bandage over a gouged-out eye. People follow the rites of politeness with stock religious phrases.

Gilead looks mundane with white curtains, grocery stores, houses and gardens, and therein lies the normalized horror. Suicide is a constant lure. What colour is death in Gilead? I suspect it is dusty, as pale as Offred’s bed linens, and leaves no trace.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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