Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

How do you review a book that was long-listed for the Booker Prize before it was even released, won the coveted prize jointly with another title, even though that is against the rules, and is displayed prominently in every bookshop and every Big W across Australia. How can any reviewer possibly write a fair assessment of a novel that has received so much hype, and has been embraced so warmly by readers?

For this reviewer, with great difficulty.

A sequel to Atwood's acclaimed novel The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments takes readers back to the Gilead, and introduces us to three different narrators--the formidable Aunt Lydia, a child named Agnes who is growing up in Gilead and Daisy, a young woman who has little idea how much freedom she has in Canada until her adopted parents are murdered and a shocking secret about her past in revealed. Eventually, the three characters all intersect in a story that neatly ties up any loose ends that were left behind in The Handmaid's Tale, whilst offering plenty of social commentary along the way. 

There are no doubts about it, this is an enjoyable read. There is something hugely enjoyable about Atwood's slightly mischievous prose and just waiting to see how the story will come together. And it is undoubtably going to be one of the few Booker Prize winners that will be truly enjoyed by a broad readership. And yet ... there is also a sense that something is not quite right with this one. The Handmaid's Tale never struck me as the kind of book that needed a sequel, though I suppose with the recent television series gaining momentum, it gives the author opportunity to have some creative control and the final word on what really happened in Gilead after Offred's escape. There's also the question of the enduring and perhaps unexpected appeal of the original some thirty years after it was released. But for all the hype and awards that The Testaments has received, it is really more of a belated celebration of the cultural impact of the original? In all honestly, I don't know. It's a good book, I liked it, a lot of other readers liked it, and it has won the most important literary prize in the world. As for The Handmaid's Tale, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, losing out to The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, a book which, so far as I know, is not enjoying the same level of cultural impact in 2020 as it did in 1986.

The Testaments is an intriguing read, regardless.

Recommended.

PS Margaret Atwood will be touring Australia in late February/early March and will be visiting most capital cities though, strangely, Adelaide is not one of them. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more