Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, Chatto & Windus, 2019; hbk £20 or better.
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RATING: 80
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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'This place is weird as fuck', The Testaments, p. 274.
I was not expecting to like this book - I thought there was every chance that it would reflect the temptation to rush something out to cash in on the recently renewed focus on The Handmaid's Tale (hereafter, HT). Well, I was wrong. It's excellent, and much more fun to read than its predecessor. So it is a pleasure to recommend it in this customary change of pace for the festival season. I don't want to tell you too much about the development of the plot, or about the characters, even Aunt Lydia, who survives from HT and turns out to have hidden depths. It is her memoir, discovered concealed in a cavity cut into a copy of Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua long after the fall of Gilead (yes, that is a spoiler, sorry, Gilead does fall, though we know that from HT) that forms the central spine of the narrative. I going to assume that you have read HT, and talk about it first. If you haven't read it you might want to before you proceed with this review - you need to know it anyway to make sense of The Testaments.
HT is an impressively controlled feat of imagination, and indisputably a classic. But like 1984, for example, it is easier to admire than to enjoy; both rely on a degree of overkill to drive their message home. In the case of 1984, the message is a dubious one, so no more about that. With HT, in contrast, the message is not one to which anyone could object. Unless, that is, you believe in the sanctity of the home, that women should stay there, and be obliged to breed and forbidden to learn to read, and that heterosexuality should be enforced by a policy of execution for 'gender treachery'. The book invokes a post-catastrophe crisis in which the biological reproduction of society is threatened, and the response is a determined reversal of the limited emancipatory gains made by women in the post-war period through a reactionary patriarchy that draws heavily for its imagery, it seemed to me at the time, on the Iranian revolution in particular. The world is cartoonish - colour-coded red, blue, black, brown and green - and to quote Leonard Cohen, there ain't much entertainment, and the judgements are severe. It needed this stark staging to succeed as dystopia, and its classic status arises both from the elegant formal structure within which the development of the narrative is contained, and from the prescient manner in which it imagines and magnifies a moment of incipient moral panic as young professional women were just beginning to prioritise careers over babies, and birth rates were falling. Like any powerful dystopia, it is as much about the here and now (in this case, the circumstances of 1980s America and the state of the feminist movement at the time) as about some imagined future. Its third and most significant feature, and the one that clinches its classic status, is the manner in which it reflects on the retreat of the feminist movement through the characterisation of Offred herself - the handmaid at the centre of the tale.
The eight short odd-numbered chapters from one to fifteen (all but one entitled 'Night', the other, 'Nap') alternate with those in which the story develops. The whole essentialising purpose of the regime is to reduce handmaids to 'two-legged wombs' (Virago, 1987, p. 146), and the narrative centres, literally, on the 'Birth Day', the lengthy eighth middle part, in which Janine (Ofwarren, a handmaid, but not the central character) gives birth in an elaborate public ceremony. In the build-up to this central event, the world of Gilead is only slowly revealed: Offred and her assigned partner Ofglen shop for food under the disciplinary gaze of Guardians and Angels, passing by and observing the Wall where those executed are hung out on display; Offred attends a monthly hospital visit, designed to check her fitness to breed; then receives a bath in preparation for the Ceremony, and undergoes the Ceremony itself, in which she is gripped by Serena Joy, the Commander's wife, and fucked by the Commander, in as passionless and antiseptic a manner as Atwood can convey, conception being the only end in view. In between, she remembers and reports aspects of her past life, the daughter she has lost, and her training for her new role at the hands of the Aunts, led by Lydia. Immediately following the Ceremony, and just before the mid-point of the book, she leaves her room at night and is found by Nick, the Guardian and chauffeur attached to the family, in an encounter that first kindles passion between them, and receives from him the message that the Commander wishes her to visit his study the following evening. This development shapes the second half of the book. From this point on, the seamy underside of Gilead comes to light, and the perverted principles for which it stands are shown to be built on lies. The Commander proves better suited to a quiet game of Scrabble than to the serious business of impregnation; Serena Joy, eager to bolster her status by having Offred bear a child, directs her to Nick as a better bet; and in a sequence of set pieces that hammer home heavily the character the regime, we witness the Prayvaganza and mass wedding of twenty young virgins to soldiers returned from the front, the visit to Jezebel's (a tawdry replica of a nightclub-cum-whorehouse), the Salvaging (public execution) of two Handmaids and a Wife, and the Particicution (beating and tearing to death) of a political opponent of the regime, before Ofglen's reported suicide and Offred's removal from the house bring the story to a close. Nick tells her that the regime black van that takes her away is driven by members of the resistance, who will set her on the path to freedom. But neither we nor she can know if this is true.
It would have been easy to make this a tale of good confronting evil. But HT is saved from such simple caricature by Offred. Neither radical nor heroic, she is Everywoman, or at least, every conventional young heterosexual woman growing up in the 1980s unmoved by the feminist revolution. She has missed the memo that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. She rejects her mother's activism, and when the coup happens, she does not march in protest, but retreats to the kitchen, to bake for her family; her instinct is to conform. Once installed as a handmaid, she says, 'I try not to think too much ... There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last' (17). Then, too, she is a sucker for romance. Right at the beginning of the book, she recalls 'that yearning, for something that was always about to happen, and that was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then ...' (13). She recalls how in her former life she waited for Luke, her eventual partner and father of her child, to detach himself from his marriage, meeting him for sex in the same hotel that later becomes Jezebel's, and wondering if he really loved her and would ever leave his wife. 'Can I be blamed,' she asks later, 'for wanting a real body, to put my arms around?' (113). When she accepts the first advances of the Commander, agreeing to his request to kiss him 'as if she really meant it', she acknowledges first that they have 'an arrangement', then that she has become his mistress; and she recalls having seen once on TV the mistress of a supervisor in a Nazi death camp: 'He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much I guess; not back then. Not at the time' (156). She is aware, then, of the figure she cuts. When she starts her illicit affair with Nick she feels bad: 'I am coming to a part you will not like at all, because in it I did not behave well ... I went back to Nick. Time after time, on my own, without Serena knowing. It wasn't called for. There was no excuse. I did not do it for him, but for myself entirely. I didn't even think of it as giving myself to him, because what did I have to give? I did not feel munificent, but thankful, each time he would let me in. He didn't have to' (280). Hence the irony of the message she finds scratched into the floor of her closet by her predecessor as the Commander's handmaid, the pseudo-Latin tag Nolite te bastardes carborundorum - 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. As her rebellious friend Moira affectionately points out, she is a wimp from the start; she is not at all in need of grinding down. And by the end, grateful to hear of Ofglen's suicide, as it removes the risk of a confession that might implicate her, she capitulates completely: 'Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. Now that you've let me off, I'll obliterate myself ... I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject' (298).
HT was a novel of its time, and the time was one of disillusion and retreat. Atwood explores at length the pattern of behaviour Shulamith Firestone memorably attacked with her brilliantly conceived 'smile boycott' - which urged women not to smile to please men and hence to acquiesce in their own submission. This makes the book both a classic, and an uncomfortable read.
Well, so to The Testaments, which is both a sequel, and the diametric opposite of HT. It is a book about choices. An epigraph from Ursula Le Guin's beautiful fantasy, The Tombs of Atuan, signals this at the start:
'Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. ... It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one' (in The Earthsea Trilogy, Penguin, 1979, p. 295).
This comes from the moment at which Tenar, condemned since the age of six to serve as the priestess at the tombs and custodian of the underground labrynth, and now escaped from the darkness to the light, cries for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil, weeping in pain because she is free. We are no longer in the world of dystopian fantasy. The Testaments is a fantasy adventure, a thriller in which good struggles with evil and overcomes it: the two young women who are its protagonists have more in common with Tenar than can be revealed without giving the plot away. Unlike Offred, they make the hard choice for freedom in their different ways. So this book is situated squarely in the time of the #MeToo Movement, and the celebration of female autonomy. Atwood knows how to tell a good story, and the narrative, set within a simple formal structure, just races along.
As noted above, then, the spine of the story comes from Aunt Lydia's account of her life, spread over fourteen odd-numbered episodes. This is notionally the Ardua Hall Holograph, the manuscript deposited in Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Interspersed this time are the stories of two young women, one in Gilead and one beyond its borders in Toronto. The first is the Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A, the second the Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B. All this is disclosed in the postscript, The Thirteenth Symposium, which you should on no account read before you finish the novel itself. Witness A is Agnes Jemima, growing up in Gilead. Witness B is Daisy, growing up in Toronto, where her parents, Neil and Melanie, run a second-hand (pre-loved) clothes store called the Clothes Hound. Since Offred was taken away from the Commander's house, two developments have taken place, and they are central to the story. First, a cult has arisen demanding the return of Baby Nicole, a Gilead baby smuggled into Canada after her mother escaped the regime (yes, no prizes for guessing whose baby this is), and second, Aunt Lidia has organised a missionary network (with obvious real world parallels) of 'Pearl Girls' who travel through Canada and elsewhere in pairs, aiming to 'save' young women and persuade them to go back with them to Gilead. In the meantime, women are streaming out of Gilead through the Underground Femaleroad Chain, despite the regime's best efforts to stop them.
I won't say more about the story, other than that the narrative is very skilfully managed, as truth after truth is revealed; and I guess it was fun to write. If you think of His Dark Materials, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will know what to expect. Aunt Lydia emerges as a much more rounded figure. From a family of 'trailer-park dwellers, sneerers at the police, consorters with the flip side of the criminal justice system' (112), she is a 'smarty-pants girl' who worked her way up, through 'scholarships and working nights at crappy jobs' to be a family court judge. But she was rounded up, imprisoned in the Stadium (echoes of Chile, 1973) and faced with the choice of collaborating with the regime or facing execution. As she says, 'I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices' (66). She is a survivor, with considerable self-knowledge. The two young witnesses are also faced at crucial moments with choices to make, and they make the right ones. Agnes Jemima is a little too given to piety, but has an infallible moral compass. Daisy is a breath of fresh air - an Everygirl, if you like to put it that way, but unlike Offred, she see things for what they are, and rises to every challenge put to her. When they get together, good triumphs over evil, in a most satisfactory way.
So, a thoroughly good read, and, paired with The Tombs of Atuan, a fine gift for anyone.
.
HT is an impressively controlled feat of imagination, and indisputably a classic. But like 1984, for example, it is easier to admire than to enjoy; both rely on a degree of overkill to drive their message home. In the case of 1984, the message is a dubious one, so no more about that. With HT, in contrast, the message is not one to which anyone could object. Unless, that is, you believe in the sanctity of the home, that women should stay there, and be obliged to breed and forbidden to learn to read, and that heterosexuality should be enforced by a policy of execution for 'gender treachery'. The book invokes a post-catastrophe crisis in which the biological reproduction of society is threatened, and the response is a determined reversal of the limited emancipatory gains made by women in the post-war period through a reactionary patriarchy that draws heavily for its imagery, it seemed to me at the time, on the Iranian revolution in particular. The world is cartoonish - colour-coded red, blue, black, brown and green - and to quote Leonard Cohen, there ain't much entertainment, and the judgements are severe. It needed this stark staging to succeed as dystopia, and its classic status arises both from the elegant formal structure within which the development of the narrative is contained, and from the prescient manner in which it imagines and magnifies a moment of incipient moral panic as young professional women were just beginning to prioritise careers over babies, and birth rates were falling. Like any powerful dystopia, it is as much about the here and now (in this case, the circumstances of 1980s America and the state of the feminist movement at the time) as about some imagined future. Its third and most significant feature, and the one that clinches its classic status, is the manner in which it reflects on the retreat of the feminist movement through the characterisation of Offred herself - the handmaid at the centre of the tale.
The eight short odd-numbered chapters from one to fifteen (all but one entitled 'Night', the other, 'Nap') alternate with those in which the story develops. The whole essentialising purpose of the regime is to reduce handmaids to 'two-legged wombs' (Virago, 1987, p. 146), and the narrative centres, literally, on the 'Birth Day', the lengthy eighth middle part, in which Janine (Ofwarren, a handmaid, but not the central character) gives birth in an elaborate public ceremony. In the build-up to this central event, the world of Gilead is only slowly revealed: Offred and her assigned partner Ofglen shop for food under the disciplinary gaze of Guardians and Angels, passing by and observing the Wall where those executed are hung out on display; Offred attends a monthly hospital visit, designed to check her fitness to breed; then receives a bath in preparation for the Ceremony, and undergoes the Ceremony itself, in which she is gripped by Serena Joy, the Commander's wife, and fucked by the Commander, in as passionless and antiseptic a manner as Atwood can convey, conception being the only end in view. In between, she remembers and reports aspects of her past life, the daughter she has lost, and her training for her new role at the hands of the Aunts, led by Lydia. Immediately following the Ceremony, and just before the mid-point of the book, she leaves her room at night and is found by Nick, the Guardian and chauffeur attached to the family, in an encounter that first kindles passion between them, and receives from him the message that the Commander wishes her to visit his study the following evening. This development shapes the second half of the book. From this point on, the seamy underside of Gilead comes to light, and the perverted principles for which it stands are shown to be built on lies. The Commander proves better suited to a quiet game of Scrabble than to the serious business of impregnation; Serena Joy, eager to bolster her status by having Offred bear a child, directs her to Nick as a better bet; and in a sequence of set pieces that hammer home heavily the character the regime, we witness the Prayvaganza and mass wedding of twenty young virgins to soldiers returned from the front, the visit to Jezebel's (a tawdry replica of a nightclub-cum-whorehouse), the Salvaging (public execution) of two Handmaids and a Wife, and the Particicution (beating and tearing to death) of a political opponent of the regime, before Ofglen's reported suicide and Offred's removal from the house bring the story to a close. Nick tells her that the regime black van that takes her away is driven by members of the resistance, who will set her on the path to freedom. But neither we nor she can know if this is true.
It would have been easy to make this a tale of good confronting evil. But HT is saved from such simple caricature by Offred. Neither radical nor heroic, she is Everywoman, or at least, every conventional young heterosexual woman growing up in the 1980s unmoved by the feminist revolution. She has missed the memo that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. She rejects her mother's activism, and when the coup happens, she does not march in protest, but retreats to the kitchen, to bake for her family; her instinct is to conform. Once installed as a handmaid, she says, 'I try not to think too much ... There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last' (17). Then, too, she is a sucker for romance. Right at the beginning of the book, she recalls 'that yearning, for something that was always about to happen, and that was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then ...' (13). She recalls how in her former life she waited for Luke, her eventual partner and father of her child, to detach himself from his marriage, meeting him for sex in the same hotel that later becomes Jezebel's, and wondering if he really loved her and would ever leave his wife. 'Can I be blamed,' she asks later, 'for wanting a real body, to put my arms around?' (113). When she accepts the first advances of the Commander, agreeing to his request to kiss him 'as if she really meant it', she acknowledges first that they have 'an arrangement', then that she has become his mistress; and she recalls having seen once on TV the mistress of a supervisor in a Nazi death camp: 'He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much I guess; not back then. Not at the time' (156). She is aware, then, of the figure she cuts. When she starts her illicit affair with Nick she feels bad: 'I am coming to a part you will not like at all, because in it I did not behave well ... I went back to Nick. Time after time, on my own, without Serena knowing. It wasn't called for. There was no excuse. I did not do it for him, but for myself entirely. I didn't even think of it as giving myself to him, because what did I have to give? I did not feel munificent, but thankful, each time he would let me in. He didn't have to' (280). Hence the irony of the message she finds scratched into the floor of her closet by her predecessor as the Commander's handmaid, the pseudo-Latin tag Nolite te bastardes carborundorum - 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. As her rebellious friend Moira affectionately points out, she is a wimp from the start; she is not at all in need of grinding down. And by the end, grateful to hear of Ofglen's suicide, as it removes the risk of a confession that might implicate her, she capitulates completely: 'Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. Now that you've let me off, I'll obliterate myself ... I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject' (298).
HT was a novel of its time, and the time was one of disillusion and retreat. Atwood explores at length the pattern of behaviour Shulamith Firestone memorably attacked with her brilliantly conceived 'smile boycott' - which urged women not to smile to please men and hence to acquiesce in their own submission. This makes the book both a classic, and an uncomfortable read.
Well, so to The Testaments, which is both a sequel, and the diametric opposite of HT. It is a book about choices. An epigraph from Ursula Le Guin's beautiful fantasy, The Tombs of Atuan, signals this at the start:
'Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. ... It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one' (in The Earthsea Trilogy, Penguin, 1979, p. 295).
This comes from the moment at which Tenar, condemned since the age of six to serve as the priestess at the tombs and custodian of the underground labrynth, and now escaped from the darkness to the light, cries for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil, weeping in pain because she is free. We are no longer in the world of dystopian fantasy. The Testaments is a fantasy adventure, a thriller in which good struggles with evil and overcomes it: the two young women who are its protagonists have more in common with Tenar than can be revealed without giving the plot away. Unlike Offred, they make the hard choice for freedom in their different ways. So this book is situated squarely in the time of the #MeToo Movement, and the celebration of female autonomy. Atwood knows how to tell a good story, and the narrative, set within a simple formal structure, just races along.
As noted above, then, the spine of the story comes from Aunt Lydia's account of her life, spread over fourteen odd-numbered episodes. This is notionally the Ardua Hall Holograph, the manuscript deposited in Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Interspersed this time are the stories of two young women, one in Gilead and one beyond its borders in Toronto. The first is the Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A, the second the Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B. All this is disclosed in the postscript, The Thirteenth Symposium, which you should on no account read before you finish the novel itself. Witness A is Agnes Jemima, growing up in Gilead. Witness B is Daisy, growing up in Toronto, where her parents, Neil and Melanie, run a second-hand (pre-loved) clothes store called the Clothes Hound. Since Offred was taken away from the Commander's house, two developments have taken place, and they are central to the story. First, a cult has arisen demanding the return of Baby Nicole, a Gilead baby smuggled into Canada after her mother escaped the regime (yes, no prizes for guessing whose baby this is), and second, Aunt Lidia has organised a missionary network (with obvious real world parallels) of 'Pearl Girls' who travel through Canada and elsewhere in pairs, aiming to 'save' young women and persuade them to go back with them to Gilead. In the meantime, women are streaming out of Gilead through the Underground Femaleroad Chain, despite the regime's best efforts to stop them.
I won't say more about the story, other than that the narrative is very skilfully managed, as truth after truth is revealed; and I guess it was fun to write. If you think of His Dark Materials, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will know what to expect. Aunt Lydia emerges as a much more rounded figure. From a family of 'trailer-park dwellers, sneerers at the police, consorters with the flip side of the criminal justice system' (112), she is a 'smarty-pants girl' who worked her way up, through 'scholarships and working nights at crappy jobs' to be a family court judge. But she was rounded up, imprisoned in the Stadium (echoes of Chile, 1973) and faced with the choice of collaborating with the regime or facing execution. As she says, 'I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices' (66). She is a survivor, with considerable self-knowledge. The two young witnesses are also faced at crucial moments with choices to make, and they make the right ones. Agnes Jemima is a little too given to piety, but has an infallible moral compass. Daisy is a breath of fresh air - an Everygirl, if you like to put it that way, but unlike Offred, she see things for what they are, and rises to every challenge put to her. When they get together, good triumphs over evil, in a most satisfactory way.
So, a thoroughly good read, and, paired with The Tombs of Atuan, a fine gift for anyone.
.