Sunday 20 October 2019

The Testaments


As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

In an afterword, Margaret Atwood explains that she wrote The Testaments, thirty-five years after her masterwork, The Handmaid's Tale, in order to answer readers' questions about what happened after the end of that earlier novel. I thought that the cliffhanger ending – with June/Offred spirited away in a van, not knowing if she was being driven to her rescue or to her death – was a brave and wise narrative choice for Atwood; my imagination filled in the blanks satisfyingly and it certainly was in keeping with her conceit that the storyline was comprised of found documents, just a slice of recovered history and we'll never know the rest. So what am I to make of this latest offering – in which three more testimonies from the Gileadean era have been uncovered, providing both prequel and sequel to the earlier tale? It feels to me like Atwood is brusquely retaking control of her story from her readers' imaginations, and by going to the other extreme and giving us too much information, she has lessened the whole narrative for me. I wasn't necessarily looking forward to revisiting Gilead, but I assumed the Man Booker judges knew what they were doing when they gave this book their prize; I'm not so sure about that now. To be sure, The Testaments is a fast and compelling read, but I didn't find it very literary, and I certainly didn't find it necessary.
Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.
The title refers to the “testaments” of three characters: the recorded and transcribed life histories of two girls – one raised in a Commander's family in Gilead (and therefore witness to the system of Handmaids, Wives, Aunts, etc.), the other raised in Canada (and therefore witness to how the rest of the world saw and reacted to the Gilead regime while it was in power). The third testament is the written apologia of Aunt Lydia (composed in secret and hidden away in the hopes of finding some far future reader), and as she was present at the founding of Gilead, some questions are answered as to how that came to pass. The three narratives are interspersed until they intertwine, in ways that I assume were meant to be shocking, but which really were not.
I control the women’s side of their enterprise with an iron fist in a leather glove in a woolen mitten, and I keep things orderly: like a harem eunuch.
Aunt Lydia's section was, by far, the most engaging. She had the widest worldview, the most maturity with which to reflect on matters, and an undercutting wit employed in conversations with others that made me grin. On the other hand, while I could appreciate that she had been highly educated in the time before, and I understand that she had some time to compose her thoughts on paper, I don't know if I believed her hastily penned missive would have been so given to literary flourish and aphorism: I was buying time. One is always buying something. Or: Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. And I have to wonder if giving Aunt Lydia a sympathetic backstory undercuts what a perfect (because unknowable) villain she had been in June/Offred's tale. Still, these were my favourite bits.
We talked about our real mothers and how we wanted to know who they’d been. Perhaps we ought not to have shared so much, but it was very comforting. “I wish I had a sister,” she said to me one day. “And if I did, that person would be you.” 
Agnes Jemima is of the first generation raised in the Gileadean regime, and her story starts when she is a young girl – telling of her school and family life – and jumps ahead a few years at a time until she is in the same timeframe in which Aunt Lydia writes out her own story. Agnes' tone is consistently immature and wishy-washy (despite being twenty-something by the time she is presumably having her story recorded), and other than serving as a witness to what her world looks like to someone who has never known another, I didn't think she really played a pivotal role in the narrative.
That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.
Daisy, the Canadian, is a foul-mouthed teenaged atheist whose story starts fifteen or so years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale. When Daisy is presented with an opportunity to infiltrate Gilead, she is unable to control her cursing and blaspheming, unable to control herself at all among the serene (read: brainwashed) young women she's meant to blend in with, and I have no idea what Atwood is trying to say about this character and how she was moulded by a free and secular society; I didn't buy Daisy's voice (or her brief and pointless crush) for a moment.
The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.
And so to attempt to smash this oppressive fundamentalist Christian patriarchy, these three storylines intersect, and as the action from this point is primarily told from the younger women's POVs, the book's conclusion reads like the climax of a YA dystopian adventure novel. And I honestly don't know what (other than answering some questions about the time before and after the setting of The Handmaid's Tale) Atwood meant to accomplish with The Testaments; I certainly don't think that it stands on its own as a social critique. And Atwood misses the opportunity to give more viewpoints missing from her original (whitewashed) tale: it might have been interesting to hear from a man (unless we are to conclude that all of the nonevil Gileadean misogynists were purged or are now acting as secret Mayday agents); and it would have been interesting to hear from a character of faith outside of this twisted form of Christianity (surely there would be a reaction by moderate Christians outside of Gilead; shouldn't a modern updating of this story include the irony of burka-clad women being escorted through the “free” streets of Toronto as they do today?); and in 2019, what about including even a brief scene of a character struggling with gender identity issues (imagine a character with a functioning uterus being dragged off to become a Handmaid while insisting he is really a man; imagine a character born into a male's body struggling with the decision to publicly identify as female and suffer whatever consequences follow; at least these scenarios would be interesting and deserving of the revisit to the Gileadean world). What we get instead is men are bad. And in particular, white men are bad. And in particular, white Christian men are bad. Of course, Margaret Atwood can write – this book is very readable – but I'll say again that it wasn't exactly necessary.


The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.


Man Booker Longlist 2019:


Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
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