I read The Handmaid’s Tale not long after it was published. I was still at university and I remember it was a much talked-about title, even then, in the way that William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice had been when the film adaptation came out, which happened to be the year I started doing my ‘A’ Levels. I tend to think of these two novels, still, as a kind of pair – both discussed important ideas, both had a profound effect on me at the time, both – again, at the time – felt safely removed from my lived reality. For my young-adult self, these novels provided a significant focus for my developing intellect, an illustration of how bad things might – could – get if complacency were allowed the ascendancy over political engagement.
I remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale and feeling a visceral, red-robed hatred of Gilead’s organising structures and founding ideology. I also remember reassuring myself that as a society we had moved past these dangers, that the arguments Atwood was rehearsing were largely theoretical.
I was a child of the Cold War. The year The Handmaid’s Tale won the Clarke Award, I was in Russia meeting other young students and experiencing first hand the stirrings of a new political reality that would bring down the Berlin Wall only two years later.
Yes, it was incredible and yes, it feels like ancient history. The Handmaid’s Tale became an instant classic because it is so perfectly conceived, so exquisitely judged as writing, so powerful as story. But the definition of a classic goes further: for a book to remain in the literature it must continue to feel relevant, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years and more after it was written. A relatively short thirty years after Atwood wrote her breakout book, it feels more relevant, more important and certainly more terrifying than it did when it won the Clarke Award. In political terms this speaks for itself. In literary terms it is an incredible achievement, and a marker of Atwood’s status as one of the most important writers of the post-Vietnam period.
I was not able to be at the London event to commemorate the launch of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, but I was lucky enough to bag a ticket for the live cinema broadcast of that event, an interview with Samira Ahmed interspersed by readings from the new novel by actors including Ann Dowd, who plays Aunt Lydia in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood has grown gracefully into her role as literary grande dame and she is wonderful in interview: incisive, insightful, sardonic, quick-witted, fearless, funny. I feel lucky to have been there, as it were, and nothing could diminish my admiration for Atwood both as a writer and as a human being. But what of The Testaments itself? It is a book that seemed desperately wanted, but did we need it? And, to put the question bluntly, is it any good?
The answer to both questions, as so often, is yes and no. There is so much commentary on The Testaments available online now that to summarise the plot again here seems superfluous to requirements. Suffice it to say that the novel comprises three alternating first-person narratives, that the architecture of the novel is structured around revealing the links between them. One of the narrators we know already – or at least we think we do. The other two we have previously glimpsed – but at some distance. The thrust of the novel’s action concerns the fate of Gilead as a political system. Where The Handmaid’s Tale was slow, interior, close-focus, its acute tension derived from the withholding of knowledge and answers, The Testaments is structured more like the later, non-book-related TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale: information is withheld, but only until the next episode. Characters are there not simply as their complicated, contradictory selves, but to represent particular facets of a problem or system. There is action and there is cruelty. There is plot exposition in the form of dialogue.
It reads well because it is Atwood and she has now reached that summit of experience where she can – in all likelihood literally – write in her sleep. But the whole enterprise feels lightweight to me, a MCU version of The Handmaid’s Tale in which cruelties are avenged and villains are vanquished. Most superhero movies bore me because they’re morally simplistic (even the ones that strain so desperately not to be). The Testaments feels the same. I came across a reader review the other day that said The Testaments felt like YA, ‘as if the sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be The Hunger Games’. I can’t think of a more accurate critical summation.
In answer to my original questions, I would say personally that no, we did not need this book. In terms of language, interiority, structure, conceit, complexity and resonance it lacks the power of the original. If The Testaments were by a lesser known author and did not have the might and weight of The Handmaid’s Tale to act as an anchor, it would quickly become lost among all the other similarly timely feminist dystopias currently being written and consumed. At the level of reading pleasure, it has plenty to offer. I turned its pages quickly and with enjoyment, finding the first half (the set up) a great deal more interesting than the facile-seeming denouement, but then that’s true for me of virtually all mass-market SFFH. I did not hate it – not at all. I will remember it with affection because of everything it represents about Atwood and about now. But taken purely for itself, as text, it is disposable.
Even in spite of this, there is a case to be argued that rigorous critical appraisal of The Testaments is not the point of the story, that this is not a book so much as a phenomenon. I find it interesting and moving that the generation of young women who are growing up with the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, many of whom will have read the novel after seeing the series, are precisely those who have flocked in such numbers to launch events for The Testaments, who have queued outside bookstores at midnight to obtain their copies first, who have felt such a passionate sense of ownership of the original novel and its characters that it is they, in some sense, who would seem to have provoked and inspired Atwood into writing a sequel, where thirty years of steady sales and campus admiration did not. In a very real sense The Testaments is their book, not mine. That the book exists is in itself a phenomenon, a testament to the power of The Handmaid’s Tale and its own justification.
Does The Testaments diminish the power of the original text? Of course it doesn’t, and nor should it. But whilst I will hope to continue visiting with The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, my beloved Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake even, and those marvellous interlinked stories in The Stone Mattress, I cannot imagine wanting or needing to reread The Testaments, which if not a bad book is a weak book by comparison. Its solutions are too easy, too rapid. It feels like wish fulfilment. No doubt I’ll watch the TV adaptation, when it inevitably arrives on our screens, but I already know in advance that it will vaguely annoy me.