Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States of America. There’s been a coup, the president has been murdered and an all-powerful, Christian fundamentalist army has imposed a terrifying new order on its citizens. The country’s borders have been shut. There is no escape. Women are the main target of the regime’s brutality. Their rights and personal freedoms have been abolished. They are no longer allowed to work, to own assets or to be in relationships not sanctioned by the state. They are now categorised according to marital status and reproductive ability. They are either Wives, married to Commanders, the founders and shapers of the new regime; Econowives, the spouses of lower ranking men; Marthas, too old to have children and now domestic slaves; Aunts, the regime’s propagandists; or Handmaids, considered fertile and forced to bear children for officials.

It’s against this backdrop of a nightmarish, future theocracy that we are introduced to the central character. Known simply as Offred (“Of-Fred”), she is a Handmaid, the literal property of the Commander. Offred is careful not to give much away and we know very little else about her: her age; that she was married to a divorcé in former times and that the relationship was annulled; that this is why her child was taken from her and placed with another family and why she was arrested. But Offred is our window onto Gilead. We learn about her new life, her mundane routine, her daily shopping trips, her visits to The Wall to pray over the rotting bodies of dead dissidents. Offred’s social function as a Handmaid is to submit to the Ceremony – a humiliating ritual of sexual intercourse in the presence of the Commander’s wife – in order to conceive. She has no other purpose. Already on her second placement as a Handmaid, she knows that if this assignment fails she has one more go before she is declared invalid and shipped off to the Colonies to clean up toxic waste along with the other women that Gilead considers useless or dangerous.

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 to overwhelming critical acclaim. It won the Governor General’s award for English-language fiction that year, and the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award in 1987. Often labelled a feminist dystopia, the novel captivates and terrifies in equal measure. Is Gilead the result of puritanism, misogyny and megalomania taken to their logical end? Is Atwood shooting readers a warning that this is where fanaticism and militarisation at the expense of humanity might lead?

Undeniably. But there is another side to Atwood’s story and to classify it as only a bleak, cautionary tale would be simplistic. Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, we’re offered glimpses of a narrator at first pushing back against the system, and then breaking the rules. She reads fashion magazines, (“I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation”), she plays Scrabble, she steals butter to use as hand cream since all cosmetics are banned. She smokes a cigarette. She risks hurried, coded conversations with her shopping partner, Ofglen. She learns of a resistance movement that has been rescuing women and smuggling them over the border into Canada. Suddenly, there’s a hope. Just a whisper, but it’s out there.

She finds a message etched by a predecessor into a cupboard in her room: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Her confidence grows. She has sex with the Commander outside of the Ceremony. She’s no longer just an object. She embarks on an affair with his chauffeur, Nick. She dares to fall in love: “We huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be. If I were caught there would be no quarter, but I’m beyond caring.”

Even Offred’s Tale, recorded onto cassette tape and preserved for future generations, is a way of protecting dignity and human experience in the face of oppression. I was once here.

The book ends with an academic lecture on the Handmaid’s memoirs, set hundreds of years in the future. We learn that soon after Offred’s affair with Nick, the Commander’s house is raided by the secret police and that Offred is taken away. No one knows where to. The recording breaks off, but the implication is that the raid was staged by Nick and that Offred was very likely saved. We know that Gilead lasted many more years before collapsing. Now it’s a history lesson. Atwood’s final message is a promise. The regime which attempted to annihilate hope failed. The human spirit is, ultimately, indomitable.