The Testaments by Margaret Atwood Review (Novel, 2019)
Content warning: violence against women, sexual assault
Margaret Atwood has influenced my writing more than any other contemporary writer. I’m still in awe of the speed at which she releases new writing in novels, short stories, poetry, and even non-fiction. She does everything and she does it well, with confidence, and with a distinct voice. There is a beautiful directness to her writing. It is not blunt, but clear. Her work is not always about easy subjects, but her writing invites the reader in.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the novel that made me not just a Margaret Atwood fan but a science fiction fan. The harrowing story of Offred is better known than ever thanks to the popular Hulu series, though I definitely became obsessed with it at a much younger age than I probably should have. Imagine a horror-obsessed middle school student being recommended a dystopian novel as summer reading for a family vacation at the beach. Now imagine him reading the book 8 times, cover to cover, over that week, and many more times in the decades that followed. That book was The Handmaid’s Tale and I still go back to it and find new things to explore many years later.
Everything about this universe hit me hard and in the right places. As a history nerd, I enjoyed pulling out the bits and pieces Atwood used to create the justification for the rise of Gilead. As a young person finishing up his catechism studies for Confirmation, I was well versed in the ever so slightly twisted biblical references that justified the belief system in the novel. As an avid reader of dystopian fiction, I was obsessed with how personal the narrative was while still establishing this vivid and unsettling world. The combination of history, cultural trends, and religion to explore how an oppressive theocracy could take root in America explained the purpose of sci-fi to me in a way that opened up the whole genre. Atwood herself claims the novel is speculative fiction, which is the basis of science fiction. We explore the world around us to imagine what could happen.
For me, the novel is so influential in my life as a reader and writer that I just can’t get into the Hulu series. Too much has changed. It’s the world I know, slightly skewed and filled with more doubt. We sympathize with Offred and fear the society, but characters genuinely meant to feel like an unfeeling threat in the novel are painted with far more depth to allow the show to grow. I don’t want to like Aunt Lydia because Aunt Lydia is the villain of Offred’s nightmares. The show wants you to understand Aunt Lydia, maybe even sympathize with her, and it’s too big a hurdle for me to get over in visual media.
The Testaments, the long-awaited but never-expected sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is an intentionally problematic text. Atwood is expanding the world of Gilead with three very different perspectives from the powerless Offred in the original novel. The three characters tell their own stories of what it’s like to be a child in Gilead, a teenager outside of Gilead, and an Aunt after Offred’s story is long over. They are contemporaries of each other, but strangers for most of the book.
Margaret Atwood can be a bit of a provocateur in her writing and that third story is where this is most apparent. What Aunt would have the most compelling story to tell about Gilead? Aunt Lydia. Who does Atwood give a voice to in text for the first time? Aunt Lydia. Atwood knows readers will have a strong reaction to this and does everything she can to turn a character who is a brutal abuser and a symbol of a dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale into a human. It’s a bold choice and one that could have gone horribly wrong in less skilled hands.
From a narrative standpoint, Aunt Lydia makes sense. She is a founder. She is one of the only women in Gilead with the access to reading and writing materials who is old enough to remember when Gilead came to be. She knows how America fell, how Gilead rose, and how the rules for what women are allowed to be were formed. She is the right choice for this role in The Testaments, but she is the one character that constantly had me questioning everything I read.
Aunt Lydia makes it very clear her goal is survival. This leads to her cruelty, her thirst for power, her constant need to surveil everyone she can in Gilead, and her manipulation through kindness. We’ve known since The Handmaid’s Tale that Aunt Lydia is intelligent and obsessed with maintaining just the right image for the various roles in society. Now we know how far she is willing to go to weaponize the ideal womanhood she embodies in Gilead to keep herself alive. She does awful and wonderful things to save herself, and even acknowledges that her future reader will have no way of knowing if what she writes is the truth. Empathy, not likability, is the goal, and I still feel unnerved from spending so much time in the mind of Offred’s nightmare.
The other two stories break new ground for Gilead and are a bit of a mixed bag. Agnes is the adopted daughter of a powerful Commander in Gilead. She is being groomed to be a wife and has never known a life outside of Gilead. We follow her entire schooling process which is shocking enough on its own. Agnes is trained to believe her only roles in life are to be a perfect wife and mother, and anything less than that is a moral failing on her part. Her schooling is bible verses and sex ed taught by the Aunts, as well as handicraft. For me, Agnes’ story tends to lean a bit too far into misery just for the sake of misery, with many personal tragedies thrown her way that don’t actually impact her growth as a character. She’s a conduit for the misery of Gilead more so than a distinct voice in her own story.
The third character is Daisy. This is where the novel is its most adventurous but also its most predictable. Daisy is an adopted teenager in Canada. She knows her parents are somehow involved in the fight against Gilead. Her life is turned upside down when she attends an anti-Gilead protest with her school. This is the first contemporary narrative we have about life outside of Gilead and it is far more extreme than anything the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale ever suggested. It is also, sadly, the most predictable storyline in the novel. I knew all the shocking reveals about Daisy’s story a long time before her character did. It doesn’t hurt her story, but it does dampen some of the impact of the parallel narratives racing to converge by the end of the book.
Atwood sets quite a challenge for herself in writing this novel at all. There are questions that the fans of the novel and series want to know the answers to. She may have never even considered them before. She may have had one idea in mind that wouldn’t have the same impact now as it could have in 1985 when the novel was first published. Despite not labeling her own work as science fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale did have an impact on the genre that makes some of her more unique narrative flourishes and ideas seem more familiar now.
There are references she has to redefine for a modern reader that were common knowledge when The Handmaid’s Tale was released. The notions of feminism, theocracies, and dystopian fiction that she delved into then have expanded and grown at an exponential rate in following decades. Scarier still, predictions she made about where the near future could go have quietly emerged and become genuine elements of contemporary society. What seemed unbelievable at first glance in 1985 feels a lot more possible now.
The most shocking element of the novel is the insignificance of the handmaid. The Handmaid’s Tale warned us of this, but Offred’s singular voice and passion made the handmaids seem more important than they are. Handmaids don’t really exist in Gilead society. They are permanent outsiders and exist only to create life. They are ghosts unless pregnant; then they’re prized possessions up to the moment of birth; then they’re disposable. It is crueler than I imagined and a testament to Atwood’s skill that something she said was true 35 years ago in this universe feels shocking and new.
The Testaments is filled with so many big plays and moments that the narrative can feel unbalanced. Agnes’ story is a far more reactive text than Daisy or Aunt Lydia’s, so by the time she finally gets to make her own significant choices, it feels almost out of character. Aunt Lydia’s narrative is as much about establishing a behind the scenes narrative of Gilead as it is a commentary on the reliability of historical narratives. Daisy’s narrative is a foil to Gilead, the story of someone too young to know a world where Gilead did not exist but idealistic enough to imagine that maybe there could be something or someone good hidden behind the walls.
The mythology of Baby Nicole, the poor child stolen from Gilead, is the glue that binds the three stories together. She’s on the symbolic level of a handmaid; you can’t escape her, but she’s not really real or important to anyone in the story. The people of Gilead pray to her because they are told to. The Aunts and Founders view her as an important asset for the continued success of the country if they can bring her back. Those outside of Gilead question if she’s real at all, since Gilead makes a lot of claims that aren’t true about their role in the world. Baby Nicole casts an oppressive shadow for such a young child. She also feels more important than some of the actual characters in the story, even when they’re telling their own tales.
The epilogue is its own knot to untangle. My interpretation sees Atwood commenting on the need for the existence of The Testaments at all. She points out how it took many years of Offred’s personal narrative being discovered for it to be significant enough to require further study of primary source documents in the world of the novel.
The significance of a man being the guest speaker at a symposium on Gilead Studies was not lost on me, and deeply influenced the amount of time it took me to write this review. I am not the target audience for this novel, and I would not dare to speak for a woman’s experience interpreting this novel. I am just a fan digging through the mechanics of a Margaret Atwood’s mighty pen.
For me, The Testaments is a fascinating novel on a number of levels. Atwood doesn’t usually play with so many perspectives at once. She toys with perspective and the reliability of the narrator, but not typically who gets to narrate the story. The existence of a sequel released 34 years after the original standalone novel by the same author is uncommon to say the least. The existence of the sequel came from a renewed interest in the novel brought on by a television adaptation that played fast and loose with the events (but not the universe) of the novel, which adds its own wrinkles into how a sequel has to treat the source material.
I don’t know how I feel about the overall effect of the novel. I just know that it’s a text I want to keep engaging with. I want explore how one of our best contemporary authors created a sequel to a novel that continues the story of a dystopian society. I want to figure out the how and why of building a sequel where the audience knows more about important aspects of the story than any character telling the new story ever could. The Testaments is a fascinating literary exercise.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is available in print and audiobook formats.
