Quick Hit: Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” is a brutal dystopian…beach read?
WARNING: Spoilers for The Testaments, The Handmaid’s Tale and (possibly) our own pending fascist theocracy.
For some reason, Atwood has become a mainstay vacation beach read for me. I know, neither the bio/eco terror of MaddAddam trilogy nor the unflinching paternalistic brutality of The Republic of Gilead exactly scream, “I’ll have another daiquiri, please”, but I spent my 2017 vacation with a pair of unlikely pals in Oryx and Crake. Last Fall, I went somewhere very warm for a few days, and I shared a palapa with Agnes and Daisy, two of the POV characters from Atwood’s latest, The Testaments.
The novel astonishes like its predecessor, The Handmaid’s Tale.Take this paragraph, which I’ve read a couple dozen times by now:
“On the fourth day of French-style flower-arranging, when we were learning to do symmetrical formal vases with contrasting but complementary textures, Becka slashed her left wrist with the secateurs and had to be taken to the hospital. The cut wasn’t fatally deep, but a lot of blood came out nonetheless. It ruined the white Shasta daisies. “
The passage comes about halfway through the book, and shows a master writer mixing a signature cocktail of beauty, violence, oppression, crackling vocab, “femininity”, feminism, womanhood, humanity, and inhumanity in describing an act that is equal parts surrender and rebellion.
The character Becka is a stand-in for millions of women at all strata in Gilead — and as a wife she will be little more than a decoration in her own marriage — a prop meant to brighten up the home until she wilts and is thrown away.
So, she goes on the offensive and attempts to prune herself instead.
Added Dimension, But Some Missing Dimensions
Whereas the main narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale unveils the world of Gilead through the limited, pinhole perspective of the trodden-upon Offred, The Testaments offers a varied view of the regime, from within (Lydia), without (Daisy) and underneath (Agnes).
Still, the story is not without its gaps. Although most could be easily hand-waived as a by-product of unreliable narrators, some of these are worth noting. For example, Atwood seems largely bored with the execution of the set-pieces she assembles. I first noticed this in the MaddAddam trilogy — that she is far from slavish in her interest in the tactical details of her own environments.
She also cherry-picks slang, sentiment and technologies from the 21st century without fully exploring or rolling out the implications of digital or virtual technologies in and around Gilead.
Atwood is notably unconcerned with the idea of famousness in her characters or the scope of their roles in larger society. Friends and enemies alike “pop in” to each others’ homes and offices. The story is staged as a play, not an epic. The smoking backdrop looms and like a matte painting, and the characters sparkle in the foreground, but the details of the middle distance are scooped out — or at least unexamined.
I don’t think Atwood is particularly interested in the daily machinations of her worlds. She reports on The Fall and is there for each resulting, individual misery, but doesn’t get messy with all the connective tissue.
But, I am greedy to read Atwood’s take on these details; I want to witness the writer’s intellect and attentions get bogged down in the administrative horrors of the theocratic hellscape she’s rendered.
Maybe it’s something about the beach.
I Highly Recommend this Book.
MY REVIEW SCALE:
5. Absolutely Essential
4. ***Highly-Recommended***
3. Recommended
2. Not for Me
- Objectively Trash
