Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 18 Oct 2019

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

If you’re interested in books and reading you can’t have missed the huge promotional blitz that has surrounded the release of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not often that the release of a book becomes a global event but this is what seems to have happened here and Atwood has been elevated into the pantheon of great writers and prophets of a dystopian future. And, as if that in itself wasn’t enough, the recent ‘rule-breaking-joint-winner-of-the-Booker-Prize' award has ratcheted-up the hype another notch this month.

For the record it’s worth saying at this point that I personally think Atwood is an outstanding but inconsistent writer – she’s capable of both vivid, engaging, dynamic prose and also very ordinary, run-of-the-mill writing. For me, The Handmaid’s Tale – which I read again before starting The Testaments – falls into the former. A brilliant, chilling book that certainly deserves to take its place alongside other classic dystopian novels by the likes of Orwell, Huxley, Koestler amongst others. I haven’t seen the television adaptation of the book – done with Atwood’s blessing I understand – but it has brought the novel to a new audience and that’s no bad thing. The presence of the unnerving figure of the Handmaid dressed in her red gown and white head cowl is now a common sight at all sorts of protests and marches where the issue of overweening, dictatorial, ultra-conservative governments are under debate.

I’m always a bit uncomfortable about sequels – they often seem to be unnecessary and always run the risk of tarnishing the original. In my view any sequel needs to come from a necessity to say something new and different rather than to simply cash in on the original - and it’s a real skill to pull it off successfully. I’m going to put my cards on the table at the outset and say that, despite the hype, I don’t think Atwood has pulled it off successfully here. To me The Testaments is unnecessary, patchily written and diminishes The Handmaid’s Tale. I know that there will be plenty of people who will disagree with this and I entirely respect those with alternative views – you’ll find a lot more positive reviews on line than negative ones that’s for sure – but, for me, the book was a disappointment.

The book picks up some fifteen years after the splendidly ambiguous end of The Handmaid’s Tale and takes the tale forward through three separate but inter-related strands told from the perspective of three very different women: Aunt Lydia, the fearsome woman in charge of the Handmaids, whose testament comes via a hologramatic recording; Agnes, who is shown growing up entirely within the regime; and Daisy, who was smuggled out to Canada as a baby and is initially protected by a Gilead opposition group but who finds herself ultimately involved in a much more active way with the resistance.

I’m not going to say anything more about the way the story plays itself out because those who want to read this book – and there will be plenty of those I suspect – would not want a plot spoiler. What I’m more interested in explaining is why the book ultimately seems to me like a mistake.

I have had the pleasure of seeing Margaret Atwood at a live event where she was presenting her poetry but where she found herself (inevitably) being asked about The Testaments which had not at that time been published. What she said was that so many people had asked her about the fate of Offred (the woman at the centre of The Handmaid’s Tale) and had effectively spotted every untied thread that she felt she wanted to tell a further story that tidied-up all these loose ends. That, for me, is the heart of the mistake. It’s like George Orwell returning to tell us the further details of what happened to Winston and Julia and maybe giving O’Brien a back story. Perhaps he could have called that book ‘2000’? But it’s easy to see why that would be such a risible notion: the power of Orwell’s book, as with Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, lies in the very ambiguity that enables people to interpret and project scenarios and interpretations for themselves. The more detail and backstory that the author provides, the more the eerie chill of the original is lost.

One of the most powerful elements of The Handmaid’s Tale is it’s ambiguities and unexplained plot pathways. It’s precisely through these routes that interpretation and debate happens – in these plot cracks we can all think through our own dystopian journey unencumbered by the authors explicit intension. Gilead is, or should be, a state of mind not a three dimensional description of how a totalitarian government works or doesn’t work.

There are also weaknesses in the quality of writing across the three story strands and this is often the case with fragmented narratives of this kind. The Aunt Lydia strand is by some distance the strongest thread and every time we left her persona I felt disappointed. For me, the storyline dealing with Daisy and the Gilead opposition movement was weak and insubstantial – it felt almost like a plot thread from a young adult novel – with the politics of this opposition movement and its relationship to the Canadian government completely under-developed.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a jewel that needed no enhancements or adornments – it stands by itself with all its complexities and possibilities. The Testaments closes down rather than opens up these possibilities in my view……but find out for yourself because plenty of people disagree with me.

 

Terry Potter

October 2019