The Testaments, sequel to the Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

This is a great book, an important book, and one that we all need to be reading, right now. Written since the election of the 45th POTUS, it comes at a deeply worrying time. A time when several rightwing, global leaders, ‘lead’ their various countries deeper into rising body counts, and yet without always seeming to suffer negative consequences as a result.

The Handmaid’s Tale was a great, dystopian book, written many decades ago, and, reading between the lines, not a topic that Atwood felt, needed a sequel until the events of very recent years. It seems like a crazy reverse pendulum swing from legalising gay marriage and a black president to now move to a time of automatic weapon-wielding white supremacists storming state legislatures. These are of course real life scenes, eerily predicted by Atwood several years earlier.

It is always possible to argue that the United States has always been a wonderfully contradictory mix of brilliantly innovative, creative and thoughtful people, blended with religious extremists deported from the motherland several hundred years ago (Plymouth, UK, the Mayflower etc etc). So it is perhaps not too surprising to see both elements vie for supremacy. With this book it is very much the logical distillation of both what happened in the previous book, and also what we see playing out on the streets of America today.

The book is so disturbingly accurate in the scenarios it describes that, initially at least, we had to read it in small doses. Naturally though your interest catches fire and it is too hard to put it down, even as you move through horrific, but utterly plausible scenarios and situations. Atwood has always been one of our favourite writers, creating utterly compelling premises and then talking you for a walk through what then might play out as a consequence of those starting points. As Atwood herself said, she aimed to only include episodes in the book that had already happened somewhere in the world already.

Since first coming across Margaret Atwood on our American Studies degree in the 1980s at Sussex, she has been a favourite writer, and has remained impressively relevant and important to read over three decades later. This is a book that we all need to read, and then stand up for what we know is important, because sometimes doing nothing is enough to let the wrong things come to pass.

#Irish Return an Old Favor, Helping #NativeAmericans Battling the #Virus https://t.co/iFEjzjJNNz

— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 6, 2020

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