Book Review of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments Book Review | To Make Much of Time blog

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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415 pages, published in 2019, a sequel to the 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (now a show on Hulu)

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

literary fiction * dystopian fiction * fiction about gender issues

where the testaments fits in:

The Testaments is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale , published in 1985. In 2017, Hulu collaborated with Margaret Atwood to bring The Handmaid's Tale to the screen. As of this writing (October 2020), Season 4 is back in production after a COVID-related hiatus. Due to the popularity of the show and the current political environment in the United States, a general awareness of the storyline has reached broad public awareness.

Do I need to read The Handmaid's Tale first? In my opinion, you need to either have read The Handmaid's Tale or have watched the show in order to have ample background to fully appreciate The Testaments. The Testaments is written as a retrospective where the prior plot is truly foundational.

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

While this novel is set in Gilead, a society formed in a post-United States world, it takes place in what is present-day Boston and Canada in the Toronto vicinity. Portions of the novel briefly travel through New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

In some ways it begs the question of travelers: How does the culture and society surrounding an area form our view of a visit to the location? Are there times when you can separate a society and a landscape/geography or are they fully intertwined in our experience of place?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: margaret atwood

I have yet to meet a book by Margaret Atwood that doesn’t make me think.

At the age of 80, Atwood has a long history as a novelist, poet, graphic novelist and more with over 50 books to her name. A resident of Toronto, Canada, she has lived in Canada most of her life with some stints in Europe and the United States. She lived in Boston twice, both times during the 1960s, so it is perhaps unsurprising that The Testaments and its predecessor are set in that city.

Atwood has won numerous prizes for her writing, most recently having won The Booker Prize for The Testaments. (In fact, there was a tie for The Booker between Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo for her novel, Girl, Woman, Other, which I recently read. Read my review of that novel - which is wholly different in nature - here.)

In case you haven’t read other novels by Atwood, here are the ones that I have read and can recommend: The Blind Assassin , Alias Grace , and her MaddAddam trilogy, consisting of: Oryx and Crake , The Year of the Flood , and MaddAddam .

REVIEW OF The testaments BY margaret atwood

Flip through the annals of history (or, heck, today’s newspaper), and you’ll be confronted with atrocities of varying degrees. There are the known names of history that are at the tip of the tongue (e.g., Hitler) and there are the unknowns dotting the multi-planed timeline of history. Most of us imagine ourselves on the side of the just and fair, standing up for others even at personal risk. Most of us are fooling ourselves, which is of course the only logical explanation for how said atrocities occur and repeat again.

It is on this premise that The Testaments picks up fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel reintroduces Aunt Lydia in a new light that provides the appropriate complexity to someone who is both complicit, aware of that decision, and is (in her own way) working as somewhat of a delayed-release Trojan horse capsule.

The novel moves through time linearly while following three unique and intertwined stories: that of Aunt Lydia, a 16-year old in Canada caught up with anti-Gilead forces through happenstance, and a privileged young adult enmeshed in Gilead and reaching the prime of her womanly life. To avoid spoilers, I have to be quite limited in explaining the novel’s path. What I can say, though, is that the arc of the novel will connect to the lingering tendrils of its predecessor novel in a way that resolves many of the ‘what happened next’ questions that readers were left with.

In some ways, though, the core of the novel can be described as showing one situation from many angles. What are the prior experiences each character brings to the table and how does that influence what each does next? How are relationships impacted by differing world views?

To me, one of the most salient elements of this novel is that it explores others’ actions in a way that is fair while still permitting judgment. This human art of grace, empathy, and understanding are more and more in short supply in the public sphere. Perhaps Atwood is leaving us breadcrumbs.

DISCUSS The testaments

What made this novel either a fulfilling or unfulfilling sequel to the plot that originated with The Handmaid’s Tale? What was most surprising to you about the timeline of this novel?

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