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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!’ Despite encountering them repeatedly over the past few years, I still cannot entirely believe the sheer number of op-eds declaring that ‘we’ — a slippage which often seems really to mean ‘women in Saudi Arabia’ — are ‘living in The Handmaid’s Tale’ ‘How far are we from Gilead?’ ‘Could The Handmaid’s Tale happen today?’ asks the typical journalist, before providing the ‘chilling’ answer upfront, usually in the very headline: ‘For some women, it’s already reality’ It’s like a tic, or an exercise in wish-fulfilment   The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly the world’s best-known sterility apocalypse It is also one of the most successful novels of the last century, and now, together with its sequel The Testaments, of this century When in October The Testaments was jointly awarded the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a gracious Atwood told Evaristo that ‘It would have been quite embarrassing for me… if I had been alone here, so I’m very pleased that you’re here too’ In fact, in light of the appropriative relation of Atwood’s novels to North American black women and their history, she has every reason to be embarrassed    At this stage, The Handmaid’s Tale franchise is fully a fandom Celebrities throw Handmaid parties; people hold their themed weddings in front of a set made to resemble the Gileadean ‘Wall’ that gender-traitors get hanged on; liberal-feminist websites delightedly issue po-faced injunctions to the world at large not to do any of this, and especially not — think of the handmaids you’re offending — to dress up as a ‘Sexy Handmaid’ at Halloween   A personal encounter with Atwood’s breeder-dystopia is also currently the mainstream trope of political coming-to-consciousness testimonies in the era of Trump and #MeToo For some reason, it is taken as given not only that the text is ‘feminist’, but that it is archetypally so Despite its author’s (and the cast of the Hulu Handmaid’s Tale’s) repeated disavowals of feminist intent, the text’s synonymity with