Book 659: The Testaments (The Handmaid’s Tale #2) – Margaret Atwood

I did not expect to read this so soon or so quickly. When I first heard Atwood was revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale nearly 35 years later I was incredibly wary about it. With the success of the Hulu series, I wasn’t surprised she was revisiting it, but I was hesitant to jump into this feet first so I put my name on the hold list at the library for an e-book version expecting not to get it until early-2020. They must’ve bought additional copies because I got it within two months of release!

There WILL be spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything that happens stop now.

The Testaments is a split narrative between Aunt Linda, Gilead-raised Agnes Jemima, and Canadian-raised Daisy. Unlike the “surprise” meta-narrative twist at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale it is made clear pretty early that these are historical documents/interviews looking backwards and being studied—I mean hell, the title pretty much tells you what they’re going to be. I don’t know whether I like this, I mean I get why Atwood had to do it, you can only have that “Oh wow!” reveal once which worked to great effect even when I read it for the first time a good two decades after it’d been published.

“Thirty-five years is a long time to think about possible answers, and the answers have changed as society itself has changed, and as possibilities have become actualities.” (Loc. 5,278)

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would if I’m honest. I had so many concerns that it would lessen the original narrative, that it would some how demean it in a way that I wouldn’t be able to explain, but I feel that this augmented the original story in a positive way. You can still read them as separate entities that are in the same universe, but not necessarily connected to each other. Okay, Aunt Lydia is clearly connected because she is name-checked in The Handmaid’s Tale and the afterward also attempts to connect the two stories to Offred, but I’m not convinced Atwood doesn’t have a third book up her sleeve to complete a trilogy.

Where I feel Atwood did an incredible job was putting the reader in the shoes of Aunt Lydia who had to knuckle under to survive.

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.” (Loc. 917)

“How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.” (Loc. 1,925)

It very much reminded me of the Nazi sympathizers and the low-level soldiers who were “doing what they were told” but were still brought to justice over it in the end. You either took a moral stand or you didn’t. Aunt Lydia acted out of self-preservation more than anything else and I found her narrative to be the most intriguing of the three. She takes us through the first days of Gilead, the creation of the women’s sphere, the education of the next generation of aunts, and ultimately the key to Gilead’s presumed down fall. And this is the reason I think there may be a third novel lingering—so much was given by Aunt Lydia to the Canadians and Mayday that is hinted at by both Aunt Lydia and the conference studying the testaments.

I struggled to identify with Agnes or Daisy, partially because they were both so moody (aka my experience with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and products of their upbringings. I wanted them to be more than they were or to lean even more into their upbringings. Not the sort of wishy-washy existence they had. I believe this comes from their narrative being told in retrospect versus Aunt Lydia’s written narrative that lead to the present in a more straight forward style.

My last words on this review are about the 2019 Booker Prize. I haven’t read Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, so I can’t comment on whether or not it deserved to win the prize, but I can say that I do not feel this was the Atwood book that deserved to be returned to the top of this particular prize. Her novel Oryx and Crake kicking off the MaddAddam trilogy would’ve been a much more deserving winner of the prize back in 2003 (especially compared to Vernon God Little). As much as I love Margaret Atwood and the variety of works she’s completed, I honestly don’t think this prize should be used for an author’s oeuvre, but instead for a specific work at a specific time. I’m wondering if the award committee bought too much into the hype of the Hulu series and the clamoring for more Gilead.

Recommendation: This wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, but didn’t disappoint either. I think this added quite a bit of depth to Atwood’s Gilead and provided new female perspectives on this particular world. I’m not sure she went far enough to answer some of the critiques of the first novel (slight nod at the end at the symposium). My bet is that there’s a third one stewing in Atwood’s brain about the actual down fall. Only time will tell though.

Opening Line: “Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive.”

Closing Line: “LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes form The Testaments
“…one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic book-burnings that have been going on across our land. The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.” (Loc. 153)

“Even the Aunts paid more attention to the pretty ones. But if you were already pre-chosen, pretty didn’t matter so much.” (Loc. 205)

“Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.” (Loc. 377)

“The flame of my life is subsiding, more slowly than some of those around me might like, but faster than they may realize.” (Loc. 446)

“It is our business to inform ourselves, since incest must be prevented: there are enough Unbabies already. It is also the business of Ardua Hall to guard that knowledge jealously: the Archives are the beating heart of Ardua Hall.” (Loc. 512)

“On my private shelves I’ve arranged my personal selection of proscribed books, off-limits to the lower ranks. Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Paradise Lost, Lives of Girls and Women—what a moral panic each one of them would cause if set loose among the Supplicants!” (Loc. 514)

“Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.” (Loc. 910)

“‘I don’t know, maybe she’s dead,’ Shunammite said. ‘She was stealing you from Gilead, she was trying to run away through a forest, she was going to take you across the border. But they caught up with her and rescued you. Lucky for you!'” (Loc. 1,153)

“The hills and swamps, the winding rivers, the long rock-strewn bays that lead to the sea with its high tides—all aid the clandestine. In the subhistory of the region, there are rum-runners, there are cigarette profiteers, there are drug smugglers, there are illicit peddlers of all kinds. Borders mean nothing to them: they slip in and out, they thumb their noses, money changes hands.” (Loc. 1,514)

“You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated. You’re a judge, so you are the educated, like it or not. They won’t want you around.” (Loc. 1,582)

“One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.” (Loc. 1,999)

“For instance, the motto of everything inside the Wall used to be Veritas, which was the Latin for ‘truth.’ But they’d chiselled that word off and painted it over.” (Loc. 3,771)

“I did take to heart your comments about my little jokes at the Twelfth Symposium—I admit some of them were not in the best of taste—and I will attempt not to reoffend.” (Loc. 5,149)

“We have not definitively excluded this individual as the author of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ tapes found in the footlocker; and, according to that narrative, this individual had at least two children. But jumping to conclusions can lead us astray, so I depend on future scholars to examine the matter more closely, if possible.” (Loc. 5,239)