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They say words have power; in Alberta this fall, they are also being held accountable. The weight of this power is evident as classics such as 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World have been marched off the shelves—not with a bang, but with the muted bureaucracy of a book-ban policy that swept through schools like a disinfectant spray, erasing what it deemed “contaminants.” Now, with the government’s sudden pause on the policy, these books linger in a strange limbo, neither restored to complete freedom nor entirely condemned. It feels less like policy and more like a plot—an unresolved chapter in a dystopian novel that seems determined to write itself.

The image is almost too on-the-nose: Orwell banned in the name of order, Atwood censored in the name of protection. Satire folds into reality until the two are nearly indistinguishable. In this unfolding drama, librarians scramble, parents argue, politicians posture, and Margaret Atwood herself gleefully joins the fray, penning satire that exposes the absurdity of it all. And in the midst of it, you, the reader, play a crucial role in shaping the narrative.

However, to stop at the spectacle is to miss the point. Beyond the headlines and the outrage lies a more profound allegory—about how societies treat imagination, how fear dresses itself as moral clarity, and how the desire to protect can so easily tip into the urge to control. This is a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship and the importance of free expression.

If this all sounds like a fable, that is because it is one.

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I. The Myth of the Perfect Children

In her biting little parable, Margaret Atwood gives us John and Mary, two children who are “very, very good.” They never pick their noses, never break out in acne, never grow restless or reckless, and—most miraculously—never die. They are spotless, stainless, eerily eternal. They are, in short, the dream children of every censor: obedient, unblemished, and utterly devoid of curiosity. However, even in satire, perfection begins to rot. What is the point of a child who never questions, never falters, never wonders? What kind of life is that, except an erasure disguised as virtue?

This is where Atwood’s joke sharpens into allegory. Governments, parents’ rights crusaders, and self-appointed moral gatekeepers often imagine the school library as a kind of garden. However, they confuse “garden” with “greenhouse.” A garden is unruly, alive, full of surprise—plants climbing where they are not meant to, roots breaking through stone. A greenhouse, on the other hand, is a controlled environment. Soil is sterilized, light rationed, and every pest exterminated before it can nibble a leaf. In a greenhouse, there is no wildness, no accident, no growth beyond the script.

Thus, the classics—those unruly texts that sprawl, that complicate, that remind us life is messy—are reclassified as weeds. Dangerous to the uniform crop. Too spiny, too tangled, too stubborn to be domesticated. Better to pull them up by the root than risk a child wandering into their shade.

Alberta’s book-ban decree makes the same mistake: it mistakes education for hothouse cultivation. It assumes children will wilt if exposed to the thorny, unsettling parts of literature. However, the irony is apparent: in trying to raise “perfect” children, the policy risks raising fragile ones instead—students shielded from weeds, but deprived of the resilience it takes to grow among them.

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II. The Banhammer’s Shadow

Officially, Alberta’s decree claims to shield students from “explicit sexual content.” However, ambiguity is the real weapon here—the grey zones where meaning slips, stretches, and multiplies. The target is never just a naked body on a page. Suspicion creeps further, casting its net over the suggestive phrase, the charged metaphor, the double meaning that hints at complexity, the inconvenient truth whispered between the lines. In this climate, even silence becomes dangerous—because what if a pause, a gap, a missing word gestures toward something unspeakable?

What unnerves the censors is not the body but the imagination. Flesh on a page can be redacted, blurred, or blacked out with a marker. However, an image that lingers in the reader’s mind—a dystopian future, a woman stripped of her autonomy, a society that slides too easily into cruelty—cannot be erased so cleanly. Imagination resists deletion. It multiplies, it mutates, it plants seeds in places no policy can thoroughly sterilize. Thus, the ban does not reveal a fear of obscenity; it reveals a fear of thought itself.

Take The Handmaid’s Tale. Its power is not in graphic detail but in its relentless “what if?”—a question that destabilizes complacency. To remove it from shelves is to declare that dystopian warning itself obscene. What terrifies the ban’s architects is not sex on the page but dissent in the reader’s mind: the possibility that a student might read, reflect, and recognize the outlines of their own society within Atwood’s fictional theocracy.

Moreover, when the order was carried out, the results bordered on parody. Entire reading lists vanished. More than two hundred books were stripped away in what looked suspiciously like “vicious compliance”—school boards obeying the letter of the law so zealously that they exposed its absurdity. A law vague enough to ban 1984 is not a law about pornography at all; it is a law about power.

Here lies the shadow of the banhammer: once swung, it does not discriminate. It crushes the explicit and the implicit alike, flattening nuance, silencing ambiguity, and teaching students that safety lies in silence. It is not protection—it is suppression disguised as prudence.

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III. Humour as Resistance

Atwood wields humour not as a balm but as a blade. Her joke is not gentle; it cuts. John and Mary—the children who never pick, never blemish, never die—are “perfect” only in the sense that wax figures are perfect: polished, bloodless, uncanny. Their flawlessness is grotesque because it reveals the hidden terror of regimes obsessed with obedience and purity. What they fear most is not the grotesque itself but the ordinary mess of human living: acne, rebellion, curiosity, mortality.

Humour, in this context, becomes a form of defiance. It does not soothe power; it unsettles it. Laughter refuses to be contained by the official narrative. It draws attention to the absurd labour required to maintain illusions of order—how much energy it takes to pretend perfection, how sterile it becomes, how unnatural it always was. A joke, when it works, forces the mask to slip.

This is why authoritarian instincts bristle at satire. Because humour is a truth serum dressed in laughter, exposing contradictions that power would rather keep hidden. Atwood’s parody of the “perfect children” is more than a gag—it is an x-ray of control, showing us that behind every sanitizing decree lies the same impossible fantasy: a society without friction, dissent, or surprise. Moreover, nothing is funnier—or more dangerous—than pretending such a world could exist.

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IV. What This Means for Us

• For readers and writers: Collection matters. Literature is not merely entertainment. It is a repository for thought experiments, alternate worlds, and warnings. When the classics go, we lose axes by which to cut through the present.
• For educators and librarians: Vague policies are fertile soil for misuse. The pause in Alberta is hopeful—but it will only last if people insist on clarity (what “graphic” means), on protections, on defending the literary imagination.
• For citizens: We must ask what it means when we prioritize comfort over challenge. Do we want children who are never dirty, never curious, never uncomfortable—or do we want children who grow, who question, who resist?

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Conclusion

The Alberta book ban, its sudden pause, and Atwood’s satirical response are not isolated skirmishes over curriculum. They are chapters in a larger fable about fear, control, and the precarious freedom of the imagination. A government may insist it is only protecting children from indecency. However, the allegory is more straightforward: the “perfect children” are never really children at all—they are the fantasy of a world without questions.

However, the books stand firm in the face of adversity. Orwell emerges from his literary exile, Atwood sharpens her pen, Huxley’s whispers grow louder from the shelf. The very works that have been deemed too dangerous are the ones that continue to haunt us, precisely because they articulate the dangers of silence and obedience. Their resilience serves as a beacon of hope in the fight against censorship.

The lesson is as old as the fables I study: you can cage the animals, but their voices still carry. You can convert the garden into a greenhouse, but weeds still find a way through the cracks. You can wield the banhammer, but laughter still echoes, unsettling the silence.

So perhaps the task is not only to read these banned and unbanned books, but to laugh with them—to recognize that humour, satire, and even absurdity are not just forms of entertainment, but powerful tools of vigilance. They remind us that perfection is sterile, that dissent is fertile, and that a society without discomfort is not a society at all but a mausoleum. They empower us to challenge the status quo and preserve our freedom of thought.

In other words: if words have power, then laughter is their rebellion. It is a potent weapon, a means to undermine the authority of those in power and remind them that their control is not absolute. Moreover, that is precisely why those in power fear it.

So, let us read 1984. Let us read The Handmaid’s Tale. Let us read the messy, contradictory parts of our history as literature, so that the next generation learns not only what is easy, but what is true. Let us read these banned books not out of defiance, but out of a determination to uphold the truth and preserve our freedom of thought.

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The Alberta Book Ban – What is it?

In July 2025, Alberta decided that words themselves needed policing. A new ministerial order instructed every public school to pull books with “explicit sexual content” from their shelves. The examples given were a handful of graphic novels—Fun Home, Gender Queer, Flamer. But the language was so vague that some school boards went further, yanking more than two hundred titles, including 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World. The result looked less like child protection and more like a purge of imagination. Supporters, mainly “parents’ rights” groups, framed it as safeguarding children; critics saw it as a blunt instrument that disproportionately struck queer literature and any story that made power look ugly. After a storm of backlash, the province hit pause, promising to “clarify” the rules. For now, the books sit in limbo—exiled, reprieved, but never safe.

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