Book review: The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood PIC: Lisa O'Connor/AP/Getty Images

In the afterword to this new novel, Margaret Atwood explains its genesis. “One question about The Handmaid’s Tale that came up repeatedly is: How did Gilead fall? The Testaments was written in response to this question.” As one might expect this sequel is fluent, imaginative and provocative. The Handmaid’s Tale, however, was ambiguous – at the end we do not know if Nick, Offred’s lover, is an agent for the Mayday Resistance against Gilead’s theocratic and misogynistic regime, or one of the “Eyes,” the secret police, the Stasi of the imagined state. It was further complicated by an epilogue by Professor Pieixoto, who supposedly discovered Offred’s tapes and casts some doubt on their validity. To make things more complicated, the original has become a very successful television series (now outstripping George RR Martin in terms of producers producing plots the author has not yet written). In this new novel, with a title resonant of Biblical themes, Atwood gives us the how of the downfall of Gilead, but not a scene-by-scene set of pitched battles.

Tonally, it seems from a different era in many ways. The Handmaid’s Tale was sly and subversive. It demanded to be taken seriously. The Testaments is lighter; often relying on rather weak jokes. One major female character uses the awful pun that the bullying male suffers from “Pen is Envy”. There is a consistent use of saw-phrases and old rhymes, which I assume is to clarify the stultified state of Gilead, where women are not allowed to read or write unless they are the childless Aunts who organise the unpaid prostitution of the Maids and the service class of the Marthas.

The novel moves between three women connected with Gilead. One is a devout young woman, Agnes Jemima, whose fear of sex – instilled, in some ways, by the Aunts – leads her to try to get to the nunnery of celibate Aunts, Ardua Hall. Her double and opposite is a young woman called Daisy, who turns out not to be called Daisy, and who has grown up in Canada, and who will have to infiltrate Gilead. Over all is Aunt Lydia, from the original, who is secretly filing her autobiography into a copy of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (an apology for my life: not the only irony in the book). These plotlines converge in a way which is almost Victorian. Without giving away parts of the plot, everything eventually connects to everything else and there is even a wink about the fact that Offred is not in the sequel to the story of Offred, albeit from the unreliable Pieixoto, making a not-so-surprising return.