Atwood M, The Testaments, Speculative Fiction, (Penguin 2019)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. £10 at time of review
In an increasingly believable dystopic future, the greater part of the United States has been overthrown by the religious fundamentalist nation Gilead. The Testaments are the story of three women fighting to overthrow Gilead, one the storyteller, pulling the strings, the other two puppets struggling to survive her manipulations.
This book is marvellous. Big surprise: Atwood is one of our greatest living writers. She is riding the crest of fame due to the television adaptation of the book to which this is a sequel. That made me a bit nervous. How to you follow The Handmaid’s Tale?
To start off with I thought she had chickened out and gone with a gimmick. The book is told from three different perspectives, one that will most certainly surprise you. Worse yet, this main narrator is puntastic. Favourite example: “Time wounds all heels.” Then I realised that her puns were her coping mechanism; for who she was, what she had to do: and in turn contributed to a tale told by three characters who are remarkably individual and distinctive.
Atwood has found a completely new way to tell the tale of Gilead. The Handmaid’s Tale felt like the story of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, waiting for their inevitable, horrible death. The Testaments is more like the French resistance fighting the Nazi’s in wartime Paris.
Now that so much is worse than when the fall of Iran inspired The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood has found a tale of hope: if we are prepared to fight, to be brave, and accept heroism can only be its own reward. She has told a tale of Gilead that makes us believe the world can be a good place again. Atwood is a genius.
