Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Popcorn and candy bars, or filet mignon -- which do you prefer?

Of course that’s something of a ridiculous question. If you’re like me, you love both, and they both are excellent treats, not meant for daily consumption. However, sometimes popcorn and candy bars make more sense, and junky food like that is what you want, and at other times filet mignon is what’s needed to make your soul complete.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (THT). It was a good read, and I raced through it, but it felt like eating popcorn and candy bars, whereas reading THT feels like eating filet mignon. The author, Margaret Atwood, is undoubtedly in a very different place now (along with the entire world) than when THT was written back in the 1980’s, and I have to imagine that has something to do with it, but The Testaments (TT) feels very direct and plot-driven, whereas THT was more poetic and ambiguous. Some of that may have to do with the story itself -- June’s story in THT was created under circumstances that leant themselves to hiding, ambiguity, and even poetry and lyricism, whereas the accounts of the three women in TT are much more direct, having been made either from a place of power, both known and secret (Aunt Lydia) or from a place of relief and retrospectiveness (Agnes and Nicole).

Hopefully this is not too much of a spoiler at this point (in case it is, you are warned now). TT consists of the “testimony” of three pivotal characters from the world of Gilead:

• Aunt Lydia, who it turns out, is a mole working against the power structure of Gilead by orchestrating the movement of information and refugees across the border into Canada;
• Agnes, formerly known as Hannah, who is June Osborne’s first daughter, and who reluctantly but surely is breaking away from the iron grip of Gilead’s society and norms; and
• Daisy, a young Canadian girl who eventually realizes that she is Baby Nicole, the long-lost pawn of the Gilead government in their media and propaganda attacks on Canada, who continues to be used as a pawn, but now by the resistance inside Gilead (being led, not incidentally, by Aunt Lydia).

Atwood beautifully begins the three stories as independent tales, but slowly begins to intertwine them in sometimes predictable but also surprising ways. Unlike THT, there is more of a real conclusion to the story in this book. It’s so definite that I would be tremendously surprised if there was a third book in this series. It also ends with another Gilead research symposium transcript as at the end of THT, which serves to flesh out even more of the ending of the story. However, I wonder if Atwood was being a little sneaky here -- did anyone else notice that these Gilead researchers were spending part of their time playing with Gileadean things, such as the Recreational Gilead Period Hymn Sing and the Period Costume Reenactment Day? It struck me as odd, and I have to wonder if this was Atwood’s way of warning us that even seemingly beneficial fascination with, and study of, historical periods can be like playing with fire, risking planting the seeds of repeating history. It just sounded too much like things like Civil War reenactors and all of that worship of the Civil War era, which is still very much with us.

Also, I was glad to see that Aunt Lydia really did have a soul in this book. We have gotten glimpses of that in the TV show, of course, but I always felt that there was more there, and TT gives some pretty satisfying answers to her motivation, although still on the popcorn level and not that of the filet mignon. The passages recounting the way in which Aunt Lydia became one of the founders of Gilead’s version of a convent were some of the most fascinating and satisfying in the whole book.

I think an interesting experiment now may be to reread both THT and TT in sequence. That might not be a good thing, because I don’t think Atwood really intended for that to be a thing, necessarily, but I’m just curious if the books would actually feel related in any way, or do you really need the TV show to fill in some of the mental gaps? Because I’ll be honest, while I was reading TT (and rereading THT a while back), images from the TV show irresistibly popped into my head while I was reading and colored it -- mostly in good ways, I think. But still. That’s a danger for a reader, and may be the source of the “popcorn” feeling with TT that I described earlier.

All in all, this book was well worth the read and I enjoyed it immensely.