Faith and fury
Atwood's dystopic, timely sequel to The Handmaid's Tale both satisfying and unexpected
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2019 (1659 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The Testaments is not just a book, but an event. Featured on almost every autumn must-read list and already a Booker and Giller Prize nominee, its release date was marked with a simulcast live interview of author Margaret Atwood on movie screens around the world.
As well, the Toronto writer’s 17th novel is not just a sequel to her 1985 book The Handmaid’s Tale but a literary work in an ongoing conversation with a pop-culture phenomenon, with some of its characters and storylines responding to the much-watched Hulu television series (which airs on Crave in Canada).
There are expectations, in other words, and Atwood does not disappoint, delivering an expansion of her fictional world that is both satisfying — delivering the answers hardcore Handmaid fans need — and unexpected.
In this urgent and unsettlingly relevant dystopian fiction, Atwood opens up the claustrophobic dread of the original novel, but she’s not quite embracing the burn-it-down, bad-ass energy of the TV series. Excavating the mysteries of Gilead, a totalitarian theocratic state in which fertile women are subjected to ritualized rape in the houses of powerful families, Atwood combines precise observation and sharp-edged tone with gallows humour. (Literally, in that last instance. The Gilead regime is extremely keen on capital punishment, and The Testaments features jokes about public hangings.)
Set about 15 years after the events of the 1985 novel, the story moves backward and forward, revealing more about the founding of Gilead while also suggesting the ways in which this purity-obsessed culture already contains its own rot. The account is relayed by three female voices, the writer of the “Ardua Hall Holograph,” as well as “Transcripts of Witness Testimony 369A and 369B.”
Agnes is a young woman from an elite Gilead family, conditioned to believe girls are “snares and enticements despite ourselves,” their very nature making men drunk with lust. The Aunts who teach the girls suggest their invisible treasure of virginity could be “ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner.”
Sometimes, almost as an afterthought, the Aunts add that “once you are married, it will seem quite different to you, and not very fearsome at all.” Agnes sounds unconvinced.
Daisy is a Toronto teenager, but there’s something about her unorthodox upbringing that suggests she might not be what she seems. A deadly car bombing results in her abrupt entry into the Mayday resistance that is working to bring down Gilead.
The first-person narration of these two young women is deliberately limited. Agnes has been born into Gilead and her blinkered views are often played for comedy. Daisy’s outsider’s assessment is refreshingly blunt: “This place is weird as f—.” Atwood replicating an idea of teen talk can be frustrating, though, and Daisy’s “like, whatever” attitude sometimes sounds like bad young-adult dialogue.
The Ardua Hall correspondent, however, is Aunt Lydia, and she is utterly mesmerizing. Atwood gives Lydia the emotionally murky, morally complex backstory she deserves (the TV series having completely screwed this up). Lydia was a judge who survived the trauma of Gilead’s early days, when female professionals were rounded up and subjected to dehumanizing torture and imprisonment.
Shrewdly sensing that Gilead’s male leaders don’t want to deal with the “womanly realm,” seeing it as petty and tainted with the “thick red knowledge” of menstruation and childbirth, Lydia seizes what influence she can and becomes a brutal power player in the nun-like order of the Aunts, who are charged with overseeing the conduct of handmaids and marriageable girls.
Unlike her pious arch-rival Aunt Vidala, Lydia is a survivor rather than a true believer, which makes her a master of realpolitik and a magnificent ironist. She often writes her secret account at night, addressing the reader directly, and there’s a complicated pleasure in being in the after-hours company of such a flawed and wily narrator.
Even as Lydia contemplates her own fall, she’s pondering “who to take down with me.” She does bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons. “I meant it for the best, or for the best available,” she remarks at one point. Motives are hard to read, and Atwood is not one to get all sentimental about sisterhood.
When Atwood was writing The Handmaid’s Tale in the Orwellian year of 1984, she was responding to the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Moral Majority movement in the United States.
Now she seems to be implicitly addressing the Trump era. The Testaments speaks of closed borders, desperate refugees and children being ripped away from their parents. It also references the #MeToo movement, with a subplot concerning the abuse of young girls and a systematic cover-up by a complicit power structure.
This topicality feels pressing but sometimes too pinched. More effective is Atwood’s larger vision of misogyny, flayed open so we see its cruelty, contradiction and hypocrisy.
The rulers of Gilead need the handmaids’ fertility while despising their sexuality; they are obsessed with the purity of their daughters even as they leverage them for status and wealth. The novel contains much less explicit violence than the TV series, but the word “slut” detonates with murderous hatred.
For a society supposedly founded on religious faith, there is little talk of spirituality in Gilead, biblical scripture being referenced only as a means of control and coercion, usually over women, who aren’t allowed to read the texts. “You could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both,” as one character suggests.
Against this oppressive and ugly power, Atwood offers the quiet power of words, especially women’s words. As with Miriam Toews’ recent Women Talking, The Testaments is about women who are forbidden to read and write finally getting their say.
Lydia, as an Aunt, has a special literacy dispensation for her job, but she pens this secret account not knowing who its future reader might be — a torturer, an historian, perhaps a woman in some imagined liberated future.
Atwood’s own words are uneven. She delivers a pacey, plot-driven thriller that’s very readable. As the women’s stories converge, however, the plotting elements sometimes overpower the characterization. Agnes’s eventual crisis of faith is given short shrift, for example.
There’s some inelegant futzing with the timeline, and while the spycraft setup is intriguing, the payoff sometimes feels contrived. The ending of The Handmaid’s Tale was open-ended — the nameless narrator stepping over a threshold, to liberation or betrayal. The Testaments’ conclusion is perhaps too neat.
If this new novel is not as subtle as its predecessor, though, it is still killingly effective. As we look around at our world, at protests in which women dress as handmaids, standing silently and holding signs saying, “We Do Not Consent,” that potency feels very necessary.
Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Winnipeg Free Press.
Alison Gillmor
Writer
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.