Hot Chocolate, Gingerbread Muffins and Margaret Atwood.

I am sitting in my usual nook, on the second floor of Waterstones Bookshop, a historic building with its majestic winding staircase and elegant balconies. As the wind outside whirls the autumn leaves past the long upper story windows, I hold a steaming cup of hot chocolate and have already demolished half of a warm pre-Christmas gingerbread muffin on my plate.

This is Cheltenham, the land of the Cotswold’s at its’ best, home to the yearly Cheltenham Literary Festival in the month of October.  

But my mind is not with this elegant scenery but elsewhere on the stuff of writing and publishing. On the table in front of me lie four of Margaret Atwood’s books. The Canadian author is one of the best known and loved authors in the world, who is as well known for her speculative fiction about societies and cultures as was George Orwell’s ‘1984’ book that shocked the world.

But the book ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is missing from the neat pile of the author’s books in front of me. One is hard pressed these days to buy or even borrow a copy. The book has been serialized and her work is on everyone’s minds and surely in all womens’ hearts.

Atwood’s book ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a shocking encounter with the future possibility of women being stripped of their ‘rights’ in a dystopian society. It is set in a possible future of New England, in a totalitarian state known as ‘the monotheocracy of Gilead’ that has overthrown the government. It is a religious state against women, where the narrator ‘Offred’ shares her life in this community, a handmaid kept for breeding with the head of the government, to provide an heir when the birthrate is dangerously low because of pollution.

The book depicts all kinds of violence against women, ritualistic abuse, sexual abuse, a universe filled with crimes and unknown punishments. It is unknown and speculative territory for the women and for the reader.

This is landscape familiar to me, in my own book ‘Trap, Prey, Lust’, to be published in February 2019. There are so many parallels here in a book about the hidden sexual crimes of the rich and famous. It is an intense territory, not so much as covering the wider cultural and political issues that Atwood addresses but a microcosm made up of the ‘Pentacle Clubs’ that derive their meaning and deviant sexual practices from historical precepts such as Gothic horror at its worst. The clubs are made up of families going back generations to the belief that the daughters be groomed and raped and given as sacrificial sexual offerings to the clubs’ members. The girls are young and underaged, they are groomed and subject to mind numbing control.

This is also the stuff of Stanley Kubrick, in his controversial movie ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, where the rich and famous go to mansions for evening masked parties, all sexual delights are on offer, many of the girls drugged and at least one death among their servile ranks.

My book, unlike Atwood and Kubrick’s work, is a novel based on my own experience of child of ritual sexual abuse, by not only my father but other members of his club, the kind of club that Kubrick depicts in the movie.

As I finished ‘Trap, Prey, Lust’ I felt not only compassion for myself and the loss of a real childhood but compassion for all those who suffer because of sexual abuse. I ask myself how I can help.

I finish my muffin and hot chocolate and go out into a world of wind and orange leaves. Helping others is an unending question for us all.

Carolyn Shanti