Proceed to seed, weed and feed
world view that has resulted in distorted sexuality but that it really hates men.
Is there a conscious reference here to the male predatoriness that has stalked our news pages since #MeToo reared it head?
I think Atwood is not making such a direct analogy: the whole effectiveness of Gilead as an idea has been that its abuses and tortures have always been cut and pasted from the real world, even before the rise of a religious lobby in America among other things, gave them a new relevance.
The oppressed feminist shriek of the first novel gets its more optimistic echo in The Testaments.
Ornamentals
Plant perennials, and divide and replant existing ones, should they be looking tired, or have outgrown their space.
Keep on top of weeds, especially those that hide beneath legitimate garden plants – they are a lot more difficult to remove once they have wrapped themselves, above and below the soil, around other plants.
Edibles
Set pheromone codling moth traps on apple trees. When the numbers of caught moths build up it is time to spray.
Plant celery and silverbeet. Once early potatoes’ sprouts start pushing through the soil, cover lightly with pea straw or hoe up some soil around them. Plant main crop potatoes.
Feed citrus trees, either with citrus fertiliser every six weeks from now until March, or mulch the trees, being careful not to touch the trunk, with layers of pea straw, grass clippings, horse manure and a sprinkling of blood and bone or bone meal.
Lawns
Repair bare or dead patches in lawn by removing dead grass and gently loosening the soil before spreading a fine layer of top soil then lawn seed. Keep well watered till new grass is established.
Feed lawns, according to your preferences – organic, fertiliser tea, or proprietal lawn fertiliser.
– Mary Lovell-Smith
Atwood pulls from multiple literary antecedents, be it the 19thcentury novelists the book mentions (Hardy and Bronte among them) or more recent dystopian work, a melodramatic, near hysterical tale that ultimately, rather pleasingly, suggests a world where women pull the strings after all.
John Lanchester’s The Wall, which shared a place on the Booker Longlist with The Testaments but didn’t join it on the shortlist, is the more elegant piece of dystopian fiction.
But it is Atwood’s book that has the dramatic thrust and power to shock to scorch the memory.
– Serena Davies, Daily Telegraph