The Testaments
Blessed are the booksellers
released OUT NOW! 420 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Margaret atwood Publisher Chatto & Windus
It’s a measure of the hold that The Handmaid’s Tale still has over our imaginations that the arrival of a sequel is the publishing event of the season. In the UK, it sold over 100,000 hardback copies in under a week, or one sale every four seconds.
These figures aren’t Harry Potter level, but they are remarkable for the sequel to a 35-year-old literary SF novel. Yet in its intense examination of dystopian oppression, Handmaid has always struck a chord. It won awards on publication, was made into a film (1990) and an opera (2000), and has been a fixture of school curricula. More recently, the TV adaptation has led to women’s rights campaigners from Ireland to Argentina donning the striking red-and-white Handmaid costume for their protests.
For anyone unaware, the backstory is thus: in the wake of a Biblically-inspired military coup, the US has become Gilead, an authoritarian state obsessed with sexual propriety and the production of children. Women are wholly subordinated to male heads of household, legally forbidden to own property or work outside the home. For a small subset, including the narrator of the original novel, there’s an even grimmer fate: they’re farmed out to elite households as breeding stock for childbearing, known as Handmaids. This sequel explores the “inner workings” (in Atwood’s words) of Gilead. A few decades after the events of the first novel, the fledgling theocracy has moulded a generation of children in its own image. But the legacy of war lingers – food shortages, deadly environmental contaminants – and so does resistance to the regime. For every vulnerable convert its missionaries lure in, Gilead continues to haemorrhage refugees.
Whereas the original story was all seen from the narrator’s (unavoidably narrow) perspective, there are three voices in the sequel: two young women – one from Gilead, the other from Canada – plus one of the few women with any authority in Gilead, the “Aunts” who prepare posh girls for marriage and fallen-but-fertile women for Handmaidhood. This broader perspective is both a strength and a weakness. Glimpses of the regime’s early days show how quickly people can become complicit in their own and others’ oppression, given the right threat or incentive. We also get a greater sense of the world of Gilead outside the elite bubble, and of the system’s limitations. But explanation comes at a cost. The written style is more conventional and matter-of-fact than the fragmentary and allusive original, and the story is likewise more familiar: plucky individuals versus the evil empire, as we’ve seen time and again on page and screen over the past 35 years.
It’s hard not to feel, by the end, that less is more: that the power of the original lay in the gaps it left for your horrified imagination, rather than the humdrum detail (and clunky dialogue) of a blow-by-blow adventure tale. Nor are all narrators created equal; while the self-serving viewpoint of the eminently hissable Aunt Lydia offers something fresh and provocative, the other two personalities get subsumed beneath the needs of the plot.
The Testaments is a different sort of novel: a spy thriller to Handmaid’s moving psychological portrait. It’s “Will they succeed?” rather than “How can she endure?” Atwood’s future remains a chilling picture of scriptural patriarchy with all the tools of 20th century totalitarianism at its disposal, and how readers respond to their return trip depends on their desires and expectations. Maybe we do need to see what happens next, when characters with agency fight the system, one more time. Nic Clarke
A chilling picture of scriptural patriarchy
The Handmaid’s Tale started off being called Offred; Atwood changed the title after she’d written about 150 pages.