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Reading: The Testaments
Oct. 18th, 2019 07:31 pmThe much-hyped sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, is mostly set around fifteen years after the end of the original novel, although like its predecessor (and indeed many of Atwood's novels) it makes extensive use of flashbacks to fill in the background. Where The Handmaid's Tale was told by a single narrator, The Testaments interweaves the voices of three narrators. One, Aunt Lydia, is familiar from The Handmaid's Tale; the others are both younger women, one of whom has grown up in Gilead as the daughter of a Commander and his Wife, the other of whom lives north of the border in Canada. (Like The Handmaid's Tale, the novel also concludes with an analysis from a future Symposium on Gilead Studies, which was a delightful nod back to the original.)
I thought that Aunt Lydia's narrative was by far the most interesting and compelling of the three strands of the novel; it gives us another woman's perspective on the foundation of Gilead that we saw through Offred's eyes in The Handmaid's Tale, and it's an interesting psychological exploration of compromise and collaboration under an oppressive regime. I loved the way that Atwood managed to make Aunt Lydia into a sympathetic character without ever entirely negating her monstrousness. Compared to Aunt Lydia, the two younger narrators are much shallower and do occasionally feel more like vehicles for the plot than fully rounded characters. And there is a lot more plot to The Testaments than there is to The Handmaid's Tale, which is essentially a series of vignettes depicting the terrible monotony that is Offred's life and mirroring the seeming impossibility of change. The Testaments, by contrast, is a pacy page-turner of a novel which I found utterly compelling and very hard to put down (although there were no real surprises; I think just about all the things that came as revelations to the characters were immediately obvious to me as a reader).
Partly because it's so much plottier, and partly perhaps because the narrators are very much more privileged in Gilead's society than Offred, it's much less bleak than The Handmaid's Tale. This certainly came as a relief, in the much darker climate of 2019, but I think that a lot of The Handmaid's Tale's brilliance came from its uncompromising bleakness and its refusal to offer comfort or easy answers, and lacking that The Testaments will never be as much of a classic. However, Atwood's prose is as delightful as always, and there's a lovely sly wit to her writing that I always enjoy. The Testaments may not be as good as The Handmaid's Tale, but on its own merits it is still really very good indeed, and I liked it a lot.
I thought that Aunt Lydia's narrative was by far the most interesting and compelling of the three strands of the novel; it gives us another woman's perspective on the foundation of Gilead that we saw through Offred's eyes in The Handmaid's Tale, and it's an interesting psychological exploration of compromise and collaboration under an oppressive regime. I loved the way that Atwood managed to make Aunt Lydia into a sympathetic character without ever entirely negating her monstrousness. Compared to Aunt Lydia, the two younger narrators are much shallower and do occasionally feel more like vehicles for the plot than fully rounded characters. And there is a lot more plot to The Testaments than there is to The Handmaid's Tale, which is essentially a series of vignettes depicting the terrible monotony that is Offred's life and mirroring the seeming impossibility of change. The Testaments, by contrast, is a pacy page-turner of a novel which I found utterly compelling and very hard to put down (although there were no real surprises; I think just about all the things that came as revelations to the characters were immediately obvious to me as a reader).
Partly because it's so much plottier, and partly perhaps because the narrators are very much more privileged in Gilead's society than Offred, it's much less bleak than The Handmaid's Tale. This certainly came as a relief, in the much darker climate of 2019, but I think that a lot of The Handmaid's Tale's brilliance came from its uncompromising bleakness and its refusal to offer comfort or easy answers, and lacking that The Testaments will never be as much of a classic. However, Atwood's prose is as delightful as always, and there's a lovely sly wit to her writing that I always enjoy. The Testaments may not be as good as The Handmaid's Tale, but on its own merits it is still really very good indeed, and I liked it a lot.
