Book Review The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

 

Atwood, Margaret The Testaments

 

I did not see the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and do not recall ever reading the original book. But I was intrigued enough by the success of the television show to pick up a copy of the the first novel and read it.  I found it a bit opaque and not all that powerful. Perhaps because it left a lot of questions unanswered.

Now, some thirty years later, comes the continuation that does answer a number of the questions left hanging in the first book. So if you haven’t read the original book in a while or have not seen the TV series, I might recommend a little brush up before tackling The Testaments.

I found the book compelling. There is intrigue, suspense, violence, a bit of humor at the absurdity of some of the rules and regulations enacted by the Gileadian rulers, and plenty of real action—especially in the final chapters. The villains are not always one dimensional and the heroines are also deeply conflicted and fascinating.

The narrative jumps around a bit in both time and place and takes some getting used to.  What is revealed to us in pieces are the stories of three main individuals one of whom has written a diary and two other women who have recorded their stories at some point after the fact. First there is the diarist--Aunt Lydia, a high official in the Gilead hierarchy, and then there are the two women (Daisey/Nicole and Agnes/Victoria who discover they are half sisters.  They all have other names too and it is one of the things that works to keep women from having any kind of identity in the society.

It is easy today to attach a lot of the plot to the world of Trumpism. Although Gilead seems to have originated as some kind of religiously conservative democracy it has developed into more of a cult than a democracy. Women remain for the most part uneducated, subservient, and valued primarily as sexual slaves.  Meanwhile the country carries on perpetual wars and is manipulated by a group of male Commanders who lie, cheat, and murder at will while claiming they are doing God’s work.  The only positive side of this coin is that autocratic nationalistic systems don’t last forever. When they falter it is often from within rather than without. Interior rot ultimately cracks the shell and revolution can then manage to make some headway. To continue the Trumpian analogy a lot of us were depending on the so called “adults in the room” to keep Trump in check.  But as several other recent books have said, the adults have been purged and we have been left with a group of often incompetent sycophants surrounding an incompetent and narcissist ruler  who brooks no criticism.  

I must also admit that with the encroaching pandemic spooking a lot of voters, a wished for course correction in November’s election is far from a certainty. 

Read it.