"The Testaments"
by Margaret Atwood
Chatto & Windus, London
2019
"The Testaments," Margaret Atwood's 2019 Booker
Prize-winning novel, is her response to the question of readers of
"The Handmaid's Tale:" how did Gilead fall? She's had 35
years to come up with the answer, and she doesn't disappoint.
Atwood uses a similar narrative technique to the one in Handmaid's
Tale, also set as historical documents served up at a history
symposium. The difference is that this time, they encompass three
perspectives: Aunt Lydia, from the generation that lived through the
triumph of Gilead, and two girls of the next generation, one brought
up in a Gilead household, to become a Gilead wife; the other, from
across the border in free Canada.
Although a fan of the first season of the companion TV series, I
found the violence and hopelessness in the second season too much to
keep watching. "The Testaments" didn't dwell on the same
ground covered in "The Handmaid's Tale," although it
alluded to it. In my opinion this made it an easier read, and
allowed it to explore other perspectives on compliance and resistance
to arbitrary power.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I'll just say Atwood does a great
job at not only answering that question, and others raised by The
Handmaid's Tale. In her acknowledgements, she thanks World War II
resisters she has known - and their influence is apparent in the
text. Atwood also refers to the axiom that guided the writing of both
books: that no event should appear that hasn't actually happened in
human history. In this sense, although "The Testaments" is
a work of fiction, it is also a work of history, and a manual for
resisting fascism, revealed in its virulently misogynistic theocratic
form - in fictional Gilead, and in a growing number of countries
around the world today.
