THE HANDMAID'S TALE

An artist and illustrator takes on the feminist classic.

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the most famous
work by this celebrated author, and it is widely regarded as a 20th-century masterpiece.
Best known for its chilling dystopian premise—much that was once the United
States is a theocracy in which fertile women are enslaved for their
uteruses—it’s also technically brilliant and gorgeously written. The TV series
based on the novel has been praised both for its storytelling and its superb
visuals. (There’s also a 1990 film version, of course, but that was neither a
critical nor commercial success.) Nault is, then, working with material that is
already familiar to and beloved by scores of readers and viewers. In adapting
the text, Nault often chooses to present Atwood’s words as written, but what
she leaves is what makes the original work sing. For example, on the first
page, Nault offers, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium…,” which is
also the opening line of the novel. Atwood follows with “The floors were of
varnished wood, with stripe 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 sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the
watching girls….” There is none of this nostalgia and longing in Nault’s
version—not even the textual elements that could have been communicated in
picture form. More troubling is her decision to make Gilead a place inhabited
almost entirely by white people. Both Atwood’s novel and the Netflix show have
been critiqued for how they handle race, but the choice to avoid race at all
seems like a poor one in 2019.

For people who prefer graphic novels to all other forms, and
probably not for anyone else.