Book: The Testaments
Autor: Margaret Atwood
Country: Canada
Format: Print
Pages: 415
Publication: 2019
Having seen on BookTube that The Testaments is not as good as the prequel, The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a little suspicious. The idea was to read this book for MARM, but I had my doubts if I could finish it in time. And after life got in the way, it ended up being left to finish in December.
The book is superb and owes nothing to the famous Handmaid’s Tale.
ATTENTION: Spoilers ahead!! If you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, I suggest that you read that first, before reading this review or the sequel. There are no spoilers for the Testaments though.
The Testament talks about events that happened 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale and portrays the beginning of the fall of Gilead. The book alternates testimonies of three key witnesses in the first crucial events that set the downfall in motion.
In the beginning is hard to tell the relationship between these 3 figures, or even with the main figures in the first book, but everything becomes brilliantly clear towards the end. Atwood’s writing is superb as usual. Only 30 pages in and I already had a bunch of highlights.
“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”
The Testaments
The setting is the same dreading Gilead from the first book: a theocratic authoritarian regime set in a divided and post-apocalyptical United States. Men, and especially women, have very few set positions that they can occupy. The men can be Commanders (leaders), Angels (Police), Eyes (Spyes), Economen (Everyone else), and the women can be Wives (of commanders), Econowives (of Economen), Marthas (maids and cooks), Handmaids (maids used for procreation) and Aunts.
Is around the Aunts figure that The Testaments centers around. The Aunts are teachers and students at Ardua Hall and are basically responsible for training and keeping all other women and girls in line.
Inside a patriarchal totalitarian regime like Gilead, the Aunts are the most powerful female figures, being the only women who are allowed to learn how to read and write. The most powerful of the Aunts is one of the narrators of the book, and she reveals a lot of what goes behind the scenes and how she got her power, by spying, manipulating and blackmailing people.
“I write these words in my private sanctum within the library of Ardua Hall – one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic book-burnings that have been going on across our land.”
The Testaments
The other two characters are two young women – one who grew up in Gilead being indoctrinated from an early age, and the other grew up in Canada. Here you get a glimpse of how domestic life inside Gilead unfolds, and how other countries deal with the existence of a regime that has deprived women of their basic rights (not that it doesn’t happen in the real world).
Is an interesting shift in perspective, it’s like someone opens the box and we get to see more of the wheels and gears that keep Gilead standing, and how fragile they are.
“Aunt Vidala said that best friends let 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 s man because men become traitors, but rebellious women become adulteresses.”
The Testaments
Atwood got most of the setting for the first book from the climate in West Berlin where she was living in the 80s. One of the most notable facts about this dystopia is that she only chose to portray things that have actually happened at some point in history, which only makes everything even more sinister. You can see it in the abduction of children of the women who then become the Handmaids – how it resembles the 60’s scoop of Native Indigenous children in Canada that were forcefully taken to Residential Schools.
The red dress of the handmaids became a symbol of feminist resistance, and it’s used in protests all over the world, although Atwood doesn’t exactly subscribe to all feminists’ positions, and has been even called a “bad feminist”. One thing she keeps alerting us to is the danger of a real Gilead “I’ve written it because I don’t believe it can never happen here” she said in an interview to CBS News.
In the end, The Testaments is a wonderful read, that only speaks to the narrative power that Atwood has. I don’t think the book is an inch behind the prequel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and I recommend it to anyone who’s read the first one to dive into The Testaments.
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