The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

    2019; 415 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the series “The Handmaid’s Tale”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Dystopian Fiction; Banned Books.  Laurels: 2019 Booker Prize (winner); British Book Awards 2020 Fiction Book if the Year (shortlisted).  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Meet Daisy.  She’s a young girl growing up in Eastern Canada.  Her mother and father own a second-hand clothing store, which does enough business to make ends meet.  Canada has a pretty enlightened view of women, unlike the fractured United States to the south, one part of which is now a theocracy called Gilead, right across the nearby border.  Daisy’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Agnes.  She lives in Gilead.  She has a mother, Tabitha, who loves her very much, and a father, Commander Kyle, who is more aloof.  But he’s a “Commander” which is a very prestigious position, and that carries over into Agnes at school, where all her (female) classmates want to be her friend.  Agnes’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Aunt Lydia.  She runs a place called Ardua Hall, which is a “Finishing School for Girls” in Gilead, close to where Agnes lives.  Aunt Lydia has a team of other Aunts under her, and is just about as powerful as any woman in Gilead is allowed to be.  Aunt Lydia’s life is a happy one, at least as long as nobody, male or female, discovers her little secrets.

 

    None of the three females know each other when the story opens.  But they will eventually meet up.  By which time none of them will be very happy anymore.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her fantastic 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, which I read for National Banned Books Week in 2014 and is reviewed here.  The book is written the first-person-POV, and switches among the three aforementioned protagonists in no particular order.

 

    If you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, you‘re acquainted with the dystopian conditions that Aunt Lydia and Agnes are subject to.  Nothing has changed in The Testaments, which takes place fifteen years later.  The same female hierarchies are in effect: Wives, Aunts, Marthas, and Handmaids.  But here the Aunts are in the spotlight, not the Handmaids.

 

    I liked that the “Canada versus Gilead” contrast of how women are treated is examined here.  Margaret Atwood is Canadian by birth, and her national pride shows through, not just on the feminism issue, but also on things like global warming and climate science.  At one point Daisy goes to an anti-Gilead rally, and I chuckled at a placard there which read “GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!”

 

    Unsurprisingly, the book is written in “Canadian”, which is kind of a hybrid between British English and American English.  So you meet the usual weird spellings such as favourite, grey, and moulded (plus an article of clothing called a “waterproof”), but also more familiar ones like realized and judgment.

 

    It was fun to learn a bit more about the storyline’s “history”.  Gilead is primarily centered in the New England area of the US.  Texas has broken off to become an independent republic, and California seems to have done likewise.  There was a conflict dubbed the “War on Manhattan” a few years earlier, and Gilead is currently struggling to maintain sufficient manpower and money to wage war somewhere along its borders.

 

    Easter traditions in Gilead have been scaled back, in contrast to other parts of the world where Easter’s pagan roots are now rightfully celebrated.  That November holiday is now two words: “Thanks Giving”, and lest you think that only women are treated brutally in Gilead, you are invited to watch the next Particicution.

 

    There are 71 chapters in The Testaments, plus an Epilogue; which means the chapters average just under six pages in length.  Although I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, and highly recommend it, I don’t think you necessarily have to read it before tackling The Testaments.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 30,455 ratings and 3,606 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 304,150 ratings and 28.261 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Liminal Space (n.) : physical spaces between one destination and the next.

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say “Pen Is Envy”.  (pg. 140)

 

Excerpts...

    We weren’t supposed to have best friends.  It wasn’t nice to form closed circles, said Aunt Estée: it made other girls feel left out, and we should all be helping one another be the most perfect girls we could be.

    Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.  (pg. 24)

 

    “You had an abortion,” he said.  So they’d been rifling through some records.

    “Only one,” I said fatuously.  “I was very young.”

    He made a disapproving grunt.  “You are aware that this form of person-murder is now punishable by death?  The law is retroactive.”

    “I was not aware of that.”  I felt cold.  But if they were going to shoot me, why the interrogation?

    “One marriage?”

    “A brief one.  It was a mistake.”

    “Divorce is now a crime,” he said.  I said nothing.  (pg. 171)

 

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.  (pg. 387)

    The nitpicks in The Testaments are few.  Some readers found the switching around among three narrators confusing, but in the hardcover version I read, there’s an icon at the start of each chapter that identifies who’s writing it.

 

    The cussing is sparse, only 12 instances in the first half of the book, although it seemed to pick up a bit in the second half, and there were one or two references to male genitalia and female fertility cycles.

 

    For me, the ending was adequate, but not spectacular.  The plan hatched by the good guys is risky, but it goes off pretty much as planned.  The biggest threat turns out to be Mother Nature, not those in power in Gilead.  The Epilogue, consisting of the historical notes from a Symposium held even further in the future and drawing conclusions from examining the records about the events in the book, didn’t impress me.

 

    What would impress me much more is an announcement that a third book in this series was in the works, but I don't think that's going to happen.

 

    9½ Stars.  Let’s not get bogged down in the nitpicking.  The Testaments is a fantastic book, every bit as good, and frightening, as The Handmaid’s Tale.  We live in a nation that has just declared abortion to be a crime, and there are proposals to throw doctors who perform them, and women who get them, into jail.

 

    We are not far from finding ourselves in a Gilead theocracy.