The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Master sculptor recasts a masterpiece

The Testaments

Author: Margaret Atwood

ISBN-13: 978-1784742324

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Guideline Price: £20

Blessed be the fruits of Margaret Atwood, author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays including the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin, and the phenomenal coming-of-age tale Cat’s Eye. The Canadian author turns 80 in November. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of her debut novel, The Edible Woman, a book where Atwood was already interested in heroines whose minds are “suddenly rendered cunning by desperation”.

It is a line that came to have terrifying significance for the protagonist of her 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale. Offred and her fellow handmaids live by their wits in the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead. Although the novel was lauded for its dystopian horrors, it was inspired by real-life events and regimes down through the ages. Or, as Atwood memorably put it herself in an article in the New York Times some years back, “If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real”.

The Testaments takes place 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, immediately setting it apart from the popular TV adaptation, whose three series are now well beyond its source material. Another difference is that this new book has multiple narrators, unlike the single, claustrophobic narrative of its predecessor. At the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred gets taken away in a van by armed men, either to freedom or captivity. The book’s epilogue suggests the former, but the ending is deliberately ambiguous. In the world of Gilead, nothing is ever truly known.

Back in the real world, there has been huge hype surrounding the publication of The Testaments. Only a few of its publisher’s staff were allowed to read the book. Reviewers, who usually get proof copies months in advance, didn’t receive the novel until late last week. (Perhaps we should have ordered the book off Amazon, who leaked 800 copies to readers in the US a few days before this.) A midnight launch was held in London yesterday, with Atwood in attendance. With such pomp and ceremony – authorities in Gilead would surely approve – the question, of course, is whether the novel lives up to the hype.

Already shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the book’s first half (a sizeable 200 pages) is a masterclass in storytelling and suspense. “Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else be a monster.” One of three epigraphs taken from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, it is a fitting start to a book with three distinct narrators, who each bear witness to their experiences of Gilead.

Atwood uses a similar framework to The Handmaid’s Tale, with an epilogue couched as The Thirteenth Symposium where academics discuss the testimonies years later. Aside from a couple of in-jokes for fans of the first book – Crescent Moon is now Madam President, and Pieixoto her contrite subordinate – this last chapter adds little except to tell us that the regime ended and the testimonies survived, which is already implied by the fact that we’ve read them.

But there is the sense throughout that Atwood wants to treat her readers to these titbits. The first narrator, a marvellously human Aunt Lydia, tells us she’s inclined to dig up the bodies “if only for your edification, my unknown reader”. Her written testimony proves a gripping opening, instantly challenging our sympathies. No villain is a villain in their own head, and so it goes with Lydia’s narrative. In a book that makes ample use of colour and symbols, we see signs of the founding Aunt’s humanity through her taser: “This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement.” Change is coming to Gilead, and Aunt Lydia, we sense, will be the one to implement it. As her back story is revealed in vibrant detail – her captivity and reformation are brilliantly done, so eerily believable – we get to know her as an intelligent, self-made woman who is, above all else, a survivor: “Sorry solves nothing, I told myself.”

Atwood’s biggest decision in The Testaments is to exclude, for the most part, the lives of the handmaids. Offred appears briefly, but only through the lens of the three narrators. It is a sensible narrative decision – the TV adaptation has already developed Offred/June’s arc – that allows Atwood more freedom to explore other facets of Gilead. Elsewhere, she includes developments from the TV series, such as Baby Nicole, who has become an emblem for the bitter relations between Gilead and Canada in the intervening years.

The other narrators of The Testaments are Witness 369A, a cherished child of Gilead who is (at 13) about to be married to the vile, middle-aged Commander Judd, and Witness 369B, a teenager in Canada whose life is upended by the Mayday resistance. The former’s narrative is the more compelling. With 369A, Atwood again gives us a surprising and nuanced perspective on life in Gilead: “You must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.” This nostalgia is fleeting, however, in a world where no woman – prized girl, high-ranking Wife, powerful Aunt – is safe from imprisonment, torture or death.

To speak too much of the stories of either witness would spoil the plot, but The Testaments does fall prey to the danger of multiple narrators. The voice of 369B is less convincing, the twists far more obvious, her motivations and capacity for memory and loss bizarrely obscured. There is a tendency to direct the reader when it comes to the more mechanical aspects of the plot – the Mayday Resistance, Operation Dead End, Aunt Lydia’s machinations. Witness 369A, for example, receives an amount of information through files that mysteriously (or not so mysteriously to the reader) appear on her desk and cause her to ask far too many leading questions. It feels like the author is forcing the story forward. Even Lydia’s narrative, arguably the most accomplished, does not escape from the occasional heavy hand: “Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker.” Her wry, doom-laden asides, which often close a section or chapter, start to seem formulaic by the second half.

Lydia is nonetheless a formidable creation and, ironically, the beating heart of this sequel. Like a master sculptor, Atwood has taken the imprint of her former character and used it to cast something that is both new and chillingly recognisable. The steely resolve, the violence, the lack of remorse remain, but we also see Lydia as a figure of hope, reaching out to future readers: “I picture you as a young woman: bright, ambitious.” Atwood gets her grim humour just right – “Penises,” I said thoughtfully. “Them again.” – and allows her the wisdom of age: “Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that a freedom of sorts?”

The Handmaid’s Tale was a single voice speaking up about the unimaginable wrongs done to women by a misogynist theocracy. The Testaments, though presenting three characters, also leaves us with a stark, solitary impression: an elderly woman who has managed so far to survive in Gilead. Though she has not been subjected to the horrors of life as a handmaid, her ultimate aim is perhaps not so different: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.