The Testaments by Margaret Atwood Sunday Book Circle - Part I
The Testaments is the sequel novel to The Handmaid’s Tale, both of which are about a post US society, Gilead, that has extremely stratified sex and class distinctions. In the sequel, the handmaid’s two daughters' lives collide and meet with Aunt Lydia, one of the women behind how women’s lives are run in Gilead, in an attempt to bring down the entire society.
I hate this book. I hated The Handmaid’s Tale if it wasn’t obvious from my video review of it on my YouTube channel. Honestly though I hate The Testaments even more than the first novel. It does a lot to ruin anything good about the first book. First of all, we have the three perspectives, all written or recorded after the fact, meaning there are way too many details for what we’re getting. I doubt that Nicole/Daisy/Jade remembers as much as she does about everything she experienced, but especially not Agnes/Victoria. Agnes did not learn to read and write until much later in the novel and I’ve seen first hand how illiteracy impairs a person’s memory. I just don’t see Agnes being able to remember as many conversations as she does from before she learned to read.
Also more annoying than that, the prose of all three is too similar. While their dialogue is often differentiated for their character backgrounds, the prose, which they were supposedly composing themselves, was not. One could say that the younger women composed their versions later in life which would account for their better diction, but we know that’s not true as Nicole/Daisy/Jade’s was made as soon as her arm healed as is stated in the first paragraph of her story. I believe it comes down to Atwood needing to flex her prosic chops and not being able to sacrifice it for the authenticity of her characters and mode of storytelling. I get it. She likes to write her prose, but guess what? If there isn’t blood on the cutting room floor, your story is not going to be authentic.
This novel is so “girls get it done” that its fucking annoying. Women are just so damn awesome and the only possible reasons for this is that 1) Atwood hates men. Like legitimately hates them at this point because The Handmaid’s Tale was pretty hateful, but The Testaments is a lot worse. And 2) feminists today don’t want any kind of nuance. They want badass women or the world’s most pathetic victims. That’s why we get a stone cold bitch like Lydia and the biggest sad sack of Becca. Now, I feel bad for Becca, but only because Atwood abused her character more than her fake father, Dr. Grove did. Yeah, I went there. First of all, I can go there because Becca is a fictional character. She’s also a badly written fictional character.
Becca is the most broken person ever. She is the exact opposite of Lydia which is why Lydia knew exactly what Becca was going to do. Oh, but don’t worry, Atwood made her a fictional statue to make up for her flat, virginal, perfect victim of a character. There are no sharp edges to Becca. There is no anger or steel. And before anyone says that her suicide attempt is counter to that, I don’t believe Becca’s attempt was some great stand against her situation. It was just her attempt at getting away from what she found unbearable. And by the way, I know plenty of women who were sexually abused as children who do not hate men or sex. Many of them love men and have a healthy picture of sex. They are neither prude nor sex fiends, which both happen, but also neither happens and it is kind of a cop out when it comes to fiction because both are tropes. Since all three outcomes happen but only two are ever depicted in fiction because only two are useful to a writer, I find it too easy of a route to take. I would have liked it more if the reason behind Becca’s aversion to marriage was based on the Aunts’ teachings about men and their so-called appetites, not some dark past.
But back to the “girls get it done” attitude of the book. Men help. A lot of the success of the plot doesn’t happen without men helping, but these are faceless flat men. The most fleshed out are Neil and Garth and even they are just a blip. If the sexes were reversed, I could see endless reviews about how the women in the book were minor and unimportant in a way that had to be due to misogyny. In the same way that for any woman who is a sidekick or a helpmate in any story they would freak out about how the male main characters used the female characters. It’s just annoying.
The Aunts have way more power than they did in the first novel. Frankly, too much. I had complained that it wouldn’t make sense to keep using handmaids because how was that sustainable, especially if the society did nothing in the way of fertility science, which was already a thing at the time of The Handmaid’s Tale release. The Aunts make it seem more sustainable in this novel, but then at the same time, there’s a lot to make it less sustainable, such as the constant in fighting and backstabbing, including among the Aunts. I find it hard to believe that none of the founding Aunts were ever taken out before the present in which Lydia records her story. None of them. I would think either one of the Aunts or one of the Commanders would take one of them out, even Aunt Lydia, but they’ve gone about twenty years without losing a single member of their founding group, unlike the Commanders. It’s important to note that women are on average more passive aggressive and willing to push others under buses to survive than men are, so while I find it believable that so many Commanders have risen and fallen in this time period, I find it utterly unbelievable that none of the Aunts have. Totalitarian revolutions have so much blood to them, especially after they take over, and it doesn’t stop upon “stability”. It just keeps going.
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