The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – published 34 years later, in 2019. I read a few Margaret Atwood novels around 20 years ago, but somehow didn’t read The Handmaid’s Tale until last year. Feminist dystopian novels aren’t really my cup of tea. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it, but I liked it enough to want to read The Testaments.
Set some time after The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is narrated by three characters – two young girls from very different backgrounds and Aunt Lydia, the most powerful of all the Aunts, who guide the girls of Gilead to grow up to live their lives in the service of God and their husbands.
In Gilead, girls are married to older men and often die very young. Babies are rarely born and are even more rarely born to the women who raise them as their own.
The two girls have grown up in different circumstances. One lives in relative freedom in Canada, while the other is the daughter of a powerful Commander, who has grown up in Gilead. Neither girl knows who their real mother is.
In Gilead, the Aunts are the only women permitted to read and write. Aunt Lydia writes her memoirs and keeps them hidden, while tracing the bloodlines of the people of Gilead and ensuring young girls aren’t unwittingly married to their own fathers.
The Testaments is both very clever and very scary. It feels like something which could happen, especially in the USA, where it seems (at least to those of us in the UK) that women are expected to live by more traditional values. It is also entertaining, with short chapters making it relatively easy to read.
Personally, I enjoyed The Testaments far more than The Handmaid’s Tale, although I appreciate one couldn’t exist without the other. If you care about women’s freedom to choose whether or not they have babies and to live as equals to men in the home and the workplace, I would definitely recommend reading it!
PS I’ve never seen the TV series. I’m not sure if I will ever get round to watching it.
I tried watching the series but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as most. I loved the books though.
That’s good to hear that you loved the books. I don’t think I will watch the series just because I know there’s been a lot of episodes and I always feel daunted by starting something like that.