Shrouded in secrecy, but Handmaid’s sequel is no masterpiece
Not a patch on the original
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus £20, 432pp) ★★★✩✩ THE breathless anticipation around The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale, has been fuelled by its shortlisting for the Booker Prize.
But the promotional hoopla was deflated d this week when Amazon drove a 20-ton n truck through the book’s media embargo by y shipping copies from its warehouse ahead of f time to readers in the US.
The people feeling sheepish on this side of the e Atlantic should be this year’s Booker judges, who have somehow let themselves believe The Testaments is one of 2019’s six best novels.
Atwood’s original 1985 novel was a taut, chilling satire imagining the imprisonment of American women in a near- future New England theocracy known as Gilead, where they serve as concubines and surrogate mothers – Handmaids – or, if they’re infertile, in other roles, including Aunts, deployed as the regime’s sinister eyes and ears.
The book left it moot whether its narrator, a Handmaid called Offred, ruthlessly separated from her young daughter, manages to escape. Surprisingly, Atwood’s baggier, arguably more ambitious, sequel doesn’t pick up Offred’s story, instead focusing on three new narrators whose tales fill in a few of the blanks left by the original novel about the rise – and fall – of Gilead’s uberpatriarchal republic.
Agnes is a well-to-do Commander’s daughter on the cusp of puberty, an arranged marriage looming. Daisy lives in Canada, defying the wishes of her
mysteriously anxious parents to
attend an anti- Gilead protest
march in Toronto.
Then there’s Lydia, Gilead’s
highest-ranking Aunt, scheming
to bring down the regime from
inside in a plot that will unite Agnes and Daisy by revealing to them their hidden origins.
Thanks in part to the television serial it inspired, shown here on Channel 4, The Handmaid’s Tale continues to attract new readers.
And it still stands up more than 30 years on – not just because it remains topical in an era of renewed US Senate debate over women’s reproductive rights but because of the lean allure of the storytelling, which runs on electric jolts of drip-fed detail as Offred’s shut-in existence comes alarmingly into view. In The Testaments, Atwood’s world-building relies instead on plodding tranches of question- and- answer sessions crowbarred into the dialogue to supply vital information. ‘By now you maybe wondering how I’ve avoided being purged by those higher up,’ says Lydia at one point, as Atwood gets bogged down in pitfalls of her own making.
Instead of slow-burn psychodrama, we get turbo- charged derring-do: This is the sort of book in which people yell ‘We need to hurry’ and ‘We made it!’
Shades of grey become black and white: Judd, the central Commander character here, unlike his more ambiguous counterpart in The Handmaid’s Tale, is a straightup super-baddie – you can all but hear Atwood cackling in the wings when he gleefully announces his latest counter-strike on the crossborder anti- Gilead militants out to topple the regime.
As Aunt Lydia slyly masterminds the takedown of a system she once had no choice but to abet, the storyline seems intended to land as a feelgood revenge narrative but Atwood’s plot mechanics, involving a patiently compiled dossier of atrocities committed in Gilead, end up hard to credit.
Feminist dystopia has been literary fiction’s genre du jour for a while now.
If you can hardly begrudge Atwood for jumping on a bandwagon she herself set rolling, it’s equally difficult not to feel that she’s basically writing her own fan fiction here.
Trouble is, The Testaments isn’t a patch on the original, and no matter how seductive the publicity razzmatazz, the Booker judges – one of whom, Liz Calder, used to be Atwood’s editor – ought to know better than to propose this serviceable action romp as some kind of timeless masterpiece.
The Testaments is published on Tuesday. The Booker Prize winner will be announced on October 14.