Book Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Hardcover, 422 pages

Published September 2019 by Nan A. Talese

Booker Prize (2019)

Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2019)

I first read Handmaid's Tale in the 90's when I was living in Syracuse. I have a very distinct sense of memory of reading it while waiting for a bus in freezing cold weather. Probably a fitting way to read the classic novel of this Canadian author. What is funny is I remember very little of that experience or the novel, when I watched the TV series a year or two back some of it came back to me the setting and broad strokes but few details. So I was kinda coming into this novel cold. I gotta be honest the TV didn't hook me past the first season.

I did, however, want to see how Atwood came back to the material and how a HT sequel written in the post Trump era turned out. Testaments is a fantastic dystopia but as to how it compares to the first book you'll have to ask a different reviewer I am basically going to talk to you about this book as it stands alone. The most important thing here is that it does.

Atwood might not consider herself a Science Fiction writer, as Ursala K Leguin famously refuted in 2013, but this novel is science fiction or speculative Dystopia whatever you want to call it. I mean there is no shame being in the same genre as Orwell's 1984 or Leguin's The Dispossessed for two really high-class examples. This takes place in an alternate America that has broken up into at least 4 nations, one of which is Gilead an ultra-conservative super sexist religious nation that is made up of bible-belt states.

The actual story follows two alternating first-person narratives, speaking directly to the reader. One is a free Canadian woman and the other is a woman in the Gilead breeding program. Atwood never cheats the form and normally I find the first person style to be the least effective of the three narrative styles. Many writers cheat the details but Atwood writes smoothly enough that I lost myself in the story, forgetting how it was written. I will say I sped through the 413 pages of the story very quickly. I did slow down a few times and about 60% of the way through the story took a turn that I really enjoyed but it is a major spoiler.

I think if this had come out during the Bush years it would have held an equal feeling of being relevant, but in the time when the supreme court is in danger of overthrowing Roe V Wade, this book feels extra powerful and needed. This book takes place at times on an underground railroad for women trying to get to Canada. You want to think that dystopias are out of reach but the painful process of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation is in our memory clearly.

Testaments is just as much horror as Science Fiction and I wish Atwood would embrace that. The tradition of using dystopia to exaggerate and clarify is an important one.

I do also think it is interesting that a book from a Canadian author that is so damning of America is popular in this country. I mean know of that bothers me as I don't have a Patriotic bone in my body. America needed the first novel and it needs this one. If you were thinking about it take the plunge and read this important work of speculative fiction.