The Handmaid’s Story and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I first learn The Handmaid’s Story by Margaret Atwood about 10 years in the past and not too long ago reread it adopted by the long-awaited sequel The Testaments. Atwood’s dystopian traditional first revealed in 1985 depicts the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian and patriarchal state created after the downfall of america a while within the twenty first century. It’s narrated by Offred, a handmaid who’s pressured to provide youngsters for Commander Waterford and his spouse Serena Pleasure.

As a reread, ‘The Handmaid’s Story’ was more energizing in my thoughts than it might have been because of the latest tv sequence which is a really devoted adaptation of the novel. I significantly admire Atwood’s talent at detailed world-building in comparatively spare prose. Despite the fact that there isn’t an enormous quantity of description of what Offred’s environment appear to be and even a lot rationalization concerning the creation of Gilead initially, Atwood paints a vivid and stunning portrait of this dystopian world, regularly constructing in direction of a dramatic conclusion.

‘The Testaments’ was the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 together with ‘Lady, Lady, Different’ by Bernardine Evaristo. Whereas the later seasons of the TV adaptation of ’The Handmaid’s Story’ proceed Offred’s story, the e book sequel properly avoids comparisons with the TV interpretation by leapfrogging some 15 years after the occasions depicted within the first e book and introducing a number of new characters. The one important character who returns in ‘The Testaments’ is Aunt Lydia who trains girls to change into handmaids. She is one in all three narrators together with Agnes, a younger girl who lives in Gilead, and Daisy, who now lives in Canada and learns that she was born in Gilead. Aunt Lydia’s perspective is probably the most fascinating of the three, because it provides a lot extra complexity to what we discovered about her within the first e book. Just like the later seasons of the TV sequence, the horrors confronted by the ladies not has the identical shock issue, however ‘The Testaments’ broadens our understanding of Gilead and is simply as pithy and pacy as ‘The Handmaid’s Story’.

The simplest dystopian fiction intently mirror actual occasions and the terrifying situations in each books all have a precedent in fashionable historical past. Atwood’s analysis for ‘The Handmaid’s Story’ included Ceauşescu’s restriction of contraception in Romania, whereas ‘The Testaments’ seems to have been partly impressed by the plight of refugees in addition to the #MeToo period. Like Nineteen Eighty-4 by George Orwell, each books conclude with a metafictional transcript from an educational symposium of Gileadean research in direction of the top of the twenty first century. The part in ‘The Testaments’ is especially vital because it sows just a few seeds of doubt regarding a few of the revelations within the e book, pertinently reminding the reader that the brand new characters’ attainable connections with Offred are by no means definitively confirmed, and that sure “information” won’t be all they appear to be.