I joined a dystopian book club some time ago and we’ve read about a dozen or so books and discussed them in various pubs. I decided to branch out alone this time and read Atwood’s The Testaments, which is supposed to be a kind of Handmaid’s Tale II.
It’s a book that has five stars sprinkled all over it, so I was expecting great things. It seems to be a novel that the publishing industry has pinned hopes on, with a massive display in the local bookstore, a fast pass to the Booker, and freebie copies of it appearing on all the favourite news channels.
I was therefore somewhat surprised that I just couldn’t get along with this story. There’s a serious baddie (the stone-cold enforcing puppetmaster Aunt Lydia – a survivor who will do anything to stay in the regime) and two teenagers (chalk and cheese, Daisy and Agnes) who provide the main action and viewpoints and we get a kind of escape plot mixed with some gritty scenes as the unifiormed establishment rumbles along doing its bad things.
Maybe I’ve become hardened to the scenario portrayed?
The convent-like situation of Ardua Hall, with its strange rituals and humiliations, coupled with a power to do anything to anyone, made the story ruthless and unremitting. Oh yes, and the dodge of plenty of conveniently placed hidden cameras.
Maybe the scenes are too reminiscent of modern-day news channels?
Perhaps it’s about the type of questions being asked?
“Was I exchanging my caring and pliable woman’s nature for an imperfect copy of a sharp-edged and ruthless man’s nature? I didn’t want that, but how to avoid it if I aspired to be an Aunt?” (p. 328) and so it dragged me along over bumpy dialogue, sometimes discovering handy facts about a character, just when they would become useful to that character’s actions.
There’s the societal splits, horrible men usually missing in action with titles like “Commander”, women like The Aunts, Pearl Girls, Marthas, Econowives.
There’s some low-key humour as well, although it gets a little lost in amongst the grimness of the general setting. “Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.”
It occurred to me that another novel I’d read had played with the themes, no doubt in response to the Handmaid’s Tale. It inadvertently tipped me off about some of the reveals later in the story.
Then there’s the little quotes which are a vital part of the novel’s press releases. “As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” (p. 407) but these are quite well embedded, and often highlighted by other Kindle readers.
(non spoiler I think): At one point a character is put into the Thank Tank, a kind of police isolation cell. She observes that her mind goes soggy in the absence of others. Existence is relative to other people, she was a one person who risked becoming a no person.
She thinks:
“Whatever my resolve might be: after some days I lost track of that plotline. The plotline of my resolve.”
Is this post-modernist writing by Atwood, or a note that slipped through the sub-edit?
We could get some internalisation, instead we get the cell clanging open and light flooding in. And soon enough we are in an air-conditioned hotel (albeit with a mushy brain). Just time for a shower or two.
That seemed to be the challenge with this story telling.
The two disguised teen characters traverse this normalised puritanical totalitarianism with its street lynchings and institutionalised abuse.
The state of Gilead might be a hill of testimony, so perhaps these ordinary witnesses to events rely on someone else to interpret their words?
There’s a horrific regime in place, a manipulator in chief and a couple of escaping resistance fighters. We get a (deliberate?) clash of literary style influenced by Cromwellian times, with a kind of youth fiction escape story, involving trucks and a Lebanese flagged fishing trawler run by the tan-skinned and bearded Captain Misimengo. Fish fingers, anyone?
I paraphrase: “It’s okay though, he rubbed his fingers together, which I knew meant money (…to bribe the coastguard…)”
Luckily Cap’n had been tipped off by a minor character named ..er..Bert. Shiver me timbers.
So I’ve hauled myself through this book, including comments off along the lines of “If you’re not enjoying it then perhaps you should read something else.”
Margaret Atwood has written something that targets the same evil empire as a novel she wrote 35 years earlier. Today's ordinariness with which the Handmaid's outfit becomes a Halloween costume, before being protested out of the stores.
The Offred, Ofglen and Serena Joy wine collection.
I paused at the start of these reflections to wonder whether I’ve become hardened to the portrayals. Now, I wonder whether we all have?
