[As the caption suggests, this is a picture of a pile of brown coffee sacks. They look worn and would make itchy dresses.]
- Why did I pick this book up?
You guys, I picked this book up because The Handmaid’s Tale has been having a moment for like three years now. I read the OG book when I was a young teen and loved it, am a somewhat fan of the show, and kept seeing posters for this damn book everywhere!
My partner also very thoughtfully gifted me this book for Christmas, so I was just so excited and ready to dive into this book. I am typically a fan of Atwood’s work: I don’t love it all, and to be frank I have a tendency to like her older work. But, since this was a sequel to her old work, and something I loved, I was super excited.
- Would I recommend why/why not?
Although I didn’t enjoy this book a ton, I would recommend it as like an entertaining read that isn’t going to require a lot of work. It’s a good book if you’re on a train or something like that.
I would recommend this book to you if you are a fan of the show the Handmaid’s Tale, but not a big fan of the book. I personally liked the ambiguity of the original book – I liked that we didn’t know if June actually escaped or not, if she had been betrayed or not. I also liked the ambiguity of whether the Colonies actually existed, or were merely a piece of propaganda to control people in Gilead.
Now, the show totally obliterated this ambiguity, and honestly that is probably my biggest issue with the show (that and its tendency to get a little torture-pornish). So, since The Testaments takes the events of the show to be true and what happens in this universe, the ambiguity of The Handmaid’s Tale (the novel) is not to be found. So again, this could be either a selling point to you, or a detriment.
Part of my dislike of this book also lies with the fact that there are so many Atwood books that I have enjoyed more, as demonstrated in my Alias Grace review, and the knowledge and expectation that I could have enjoyed this book so much more definitely hurt its overall score, and made my criticisms a tad more vitriolic than they would have been with a different author. I had expectations Margaret!
- Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:
Now, this story is told from the point of view of three women; we quickly discover one of them is the famed Aunt Lydia, and the other two are some sort of peripheral girls (who eventually become aunts), only identified by their “witness testimony” number. Now, this led me to believe that maybe these women had conspired against Gilead and been caught, and that they were being persecuted and held up as an example to the women of Gilead of what not to do. However, it quickly becomes clear that instead, these women make it OUT of Gilead, and these testimonies are their record of what happened in Gilead. This was interesting, but quickly lowered the stakes for me, as I knew these women had to be successful for their testimonies to be collected and preserved.
Anonymous woman 1 (known as Agnes) is revealed to be the ‘daughter’ of a high-ranking Commander and his wife. We quickly discover that she is not their biological daughter, and that her biological mother is hunted by Gilead. It is pretty easy to connect the dots and realize that Agnes is June’s first daughter, the one she was separated from before the events of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Anonymous woman 2 (known as Daisy) is a young girl living in Canada. Her parents run a secondhand clothing store. She doesn’t have a lot in common with them. It becomes really easy to deduce that she is the escaped Baby Nicole, or June’s second baby that is spirited out of Gilead by June and Serena Joy in the TV show. I felt like Atwood was putting clues about Daisy’s lineage way too much, because I figured it out as soon as we saw we had a character in Canada, and after Baby Nicole got mentioned a few times just felt like, “ok I get it, just actually give me the reveal because I’ve figured it out”.
This is one of those weird books where a lot of stuff happens, but also not a lot happens? It’s very plot driven, as opposed to character driven, and apart from Lydia, the characters are mostly responding to events around them, or having things done to them, rather than being active participants. This means I’m going to gloss over a lot of stuff.
But basically, Baby Nicole/Daisy’s fake parents get killed in a bomb, obviously placed by Gilead. This is when Daisy learns that she is actually Baby Nicole, and that Mayday (the resistance group, remember them?) has an operative in Gilead sending them a ton of insider information and documents. Aparently, their way of transmitting information is compromised or something, because the source demand that Baby Nicole be delivered to Gilead, given a ton of documents on a microdot implanted in her arm, and then extracted. We easily realize that this mystery source is Aunt Lydia! Surprise, this whole time Aunt Lydia has just been trying to get powerful to dismantle Gilead from within!
Baby Nicole makes in into Gilead as a ‘Pearl Girl’ who are like Gilead’s missionaries and Aunts in training. There she meets Agnes (who if you are not keeping track, is her half sister, DUN DUN DUN!) who is training to be an Aunt. As soon as this happens, Lydia reveals herself to Agnes and Nicole as conspiring against Gilead, and explains Nicole’s identity to Agnes. Then she tells them that they must escape with these documents and hopefully bring about the downfall of Gilead.
Then there is a bit of a thrilling ish escape (where we basically get to see what is only hinted at in The Handmaid’s Tale – escaping Gilead and the routes that mimic the Underground Railroad) and then Agnes and Nicole make it to Canada, where they see June, their mom. Then the book ends, and we get an epilogue that mimics the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale; it is an academic conference on the topic of Gilead, this one held a year after the one we read about in the first book. There is the usual commentary that society has not changed much, the idea that fascism and regimes can be dismantled from within, and the notion that we must learn from history. The end. Praise be, under his eye, it is over. Blessed be the fruit that is moving on to a better dystopian series.
[This is a picture of The Testaments: the cover is mostly black, with a graphic of a woman in a white wimple and green cloak. Over this woman is the silhouette of a woman with arms upraised, perhaps in rebellion?]
- Overall brain gushings :
Here are my overall thoughts about why this book pales in comparison to the OG tale, starting with my least favourite thing; like the show, this book kills all the ambiguity I loved in The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved not knowing if June lived past the first text, I loved not knowing if the colonies were real or propaganda, and I especially loved not knowing Aunt Lydia and other nefarious characters’ motivations or true allegiances! I was seriously bummed at the way in which this book killed Aunt Lydia’s complexity. Sometimes, people are evil. Sometimes, people want power. Sometimes, people will betray the very communities they belong to to achieve their means. And sometimes, those people are women. I also thought that Aunt Lydia’s idea of dismantling Gilead from within was sort of dumb, and obscured the reality that even Lydia wasn’t willing to admit to herself: she did everything out of the selfish need for survival. Then, she probably felt guilty and decided she needed to change her ways. To me, this is more interesting, and less naive. So why the hell did Atwood make the character choices she did?
Also, while The Handmaid’s Tale is a story about bearing witness to survival, about what people will go through to survive, and the ones who decide survival is not enough, The Testaments is a just an action tale about resisting an oppressive regime. There isn’t even much ideological depth or exploration, and instead of a poignant narrative about humanity and the desire to live, we get a somewhat exciting escape narrative. Which is fine if that is what you came for. That is not what I came to the narrative world of Gilead for.
- What does it mean?
Ok. Well, obviously this book means that being a theocratic dystopia is bad. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the ties that bind people: are we bound by experience, by gender, by familial ties, by belief?
This book also means that even in the face of desperation, of what seems like a totally dystopian reality, there is room for hope. Dictatorships and horrible regimes have been overthrown, and can be again. So to those of us who have been incredibly depressed by the cheeto known as Trump, it’s not over until the results of the 2020 election! And if he wins, I guess we have to pray that a high-ranking woman will pull an Aunt Lydia and try and burn it all to the ground?
And not to state the ridiculously evident, but the book wants us to realize the dangers of viewing women as property, drawing comparisons between the infringements on women’s reproductive rights and the all-too-scary-because-it-could-be-the-future Republic of Gilead.
- Favourite passages :
Oddly enough for a Atwood book, I had very few passages flagged as interesting or impactful; again, see my rating for this book.
I was at the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.
Atwood, pg 44.
To my parents, I apologize for being like Baby Nicole as a teenager and thinking you knew nothing.
Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estee. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?
pg 81.
The Testaments obviously follows a lot of interesting themes that The Handmaid’s Tale is interested in, and this is probably the clearest indication we have of Gilead’s core beliefs about women and how they subjugate them.
“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
pg 294.
I found this passage really moving and interesting with regard to the different reactions that people will have in the face of crisis and oppression. Will we live? Will we join the bad guys to try and dismantle it from within? Is just living enough? What is more brave? What has a better chance of affecting real change?
- If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :
I mean, if you haven’t read it yet, go read The Handmaid’s Tale! All the things I dislike about The Testaments lies largely in how great Handmaid is and it never needed a sequel! I hate sequel and remake culture, argh, make it stop!
If you want an excellent read about the sexual subjugation of women, and the lessons we can take from history, read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Another great feminist-dystopia that I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended before is Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.
I haven’t read this book yet, but it is going on my to-read list right now; Naomi Alderman’s, The Power, which is apparently about a world where women can harm people just by touching them, and the ways in which women begin to enjoy this dangerous new-found dominance.
Stay tuned for my next review, Ronan Farrow’s explosive Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. A little bit of a trigger warning as this is Farrow’s account of his various investigations into sexual assaults in media and politics.
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