Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course where we studied the text in-depth, so it was relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series. People who watch it may make different connections to The Testaments than I did and react differently.
The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a baby. One of the four head Aunts complicit in imposing the strict regime of oppression on the women of Gilead is the second storyteller. The final narrator is a teenager who grew up in Gilead and joined the Aunts to flee an attempted arranged marriage.
The story has a plot which the author does not fully explain. Atwood leaves it up to the reader to work out why some things happen rather than have one of the characters tell the reader why she is doing something. For example, I wondered why the Aunt chose a particular courier to smuggle documents out of Gilead. A reader looking for plot holes might think they had found one, as it took me a while to figure out why that particular courier was chosen.
The novel switches back and forth between points of view, but unlike many books that use this technique, I wasn’t troubled by the frequent change of viewpoint as I was keen to learn more about that person’s story. This indicates that all the storylines were equally important and not dominated by one main storyline with interrupting subplots.
I found the novel a real page-turner. I read its 400 pages in five sittings, which is quick for me. I particularly enjoyed discovering more about how Gilead came into being and the origins and motivations of the original Aunts.
The Testaments’ words flow off the page. Atwood is very much a writer who writes for readers. She would rather impress with her ideas, themes and story than with her clever word usage. I have read four of her other novels, including the excellent Maddaddam trilogy, so she is one of my favourite authors.
The Testaments has a much more definite ending than the somewhat ambiguous finish of The Handmaid’s Tale. Overall, I think The Testaments is an excellent end to the world of Gilead, but it is not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, which created Gilead and the belief system imposed on the people there. I think The Handmaid’s Tale would have been a more worthy winner of the Booker Prize. But The Testaments is still a great novel by a great speculative fiction writer.
3 Responses
Interesting to hear your opinion on 'The Testaments'. I've been avoiding reading it because I thought it might fall too far short of 'The Handmaid's Tale'. You've reassured me so I'll be having a look at it.
It's well worth reading, especially if you want to find out what happened to Offred. It reads a bit like a espionage thriller.
Great review Graham. You don't give away the plot but make an analysis of her particular style and how this book relates to the first. That's certainly a quick read too.