Author: Margaret Atwood. Date finished: around 29th December (2019, oops). Recommendation: I’m a bit late to the game with this one as the media sensation this book caused has somewhat blown over now, but I got it for Christmas.
To start a blog on books I have read in 2020 on a book I finished in the previous decade is clearly a massive cheat. I’ve been debating whether to include Atwood’s most recent novel and the long-awaited sequel to the stalwart of feminist literature, The Handmaid’s Tale, for a while now. However, in the end I concluded that this monumental book was such a thrilling read that I could not not include it in a blog about enjoyable reading experiences. Indeed, The Testaments transcends simple enjoyment, this gripping novel with its intertwining, multiple narrators is characteristic of Atwood’ style, able to find moments of comedy while exploring the darkest tendencies of human existence: power, control and violence. It was particularly interesting to see the character of Aunt Lydia reassessed from the previous novel. I was always repulsed by her, perhaps more so than others because of my perhaps irrational horror at her sharing my name. Lydias do not appear often in literature in my experience and the only two I can think of is Austen’s silly and irreverent Lydia Bennet (I was always an Elizabeth fan personally), and the above mentioned Aunt Lydia. By delving into her backstory, Atwood explores the effect of trauma and torture, addressing how easily the oppressed becomes the oppressor in totalitarian societies. Whole dissertations could be written on how Atwood’s masterful prose reflects the unequal societies we still live in, and I am haunted by an interview I once read with her where she explained that nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale had been made up. Although the abuses of rights had happened across different governments and societies to varying degrees and she had collected them to institutionalise Gilead as a dangerous theocracy, all the torture scenes, restrictive laws and punishments are based on truth. I do not know if this is the case for The Testaments but I can see it being so. The world Atwood creates in both novels is not simply a dystopia but a warning of what humanity has become capable of, and what it could still become.
Reading 2020 