Atwood invents Gilead, an obviously post-Trumpian American dystopia in which democracy has given way to totalitarianism, Canada is the last bastion of the Free World, women are the main target of oppression, a character named Aunt Lydia, posing as one of Gilead's most esteemed members of a quasi-religious nunnery of oppressors, writes a subversive analogue to Newman's "Apologia pro vita mea" and a fictional Underground FemaleRoad spirits women back and forth across a porous border between Canada and New England. Two other narratives are interleaved with that of Aunt Lydia, a homage perhaps to the journalistic origins of the novel in Richardson and Defoe.
And, "God be praised", Ms. Atwood's mordant wit is fully on display throughout:
so if women were now the enemy I could see why they might have been targeted . . . All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.