The Testaments - Handmaid sequel. Anyone interested in discussing? SPOILERS ANTICIPATED

Cafe Society
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My wife and I recently read Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Anyone else interested in discussing this book - or anything else Handmaid-ish?

I’m happy for this thread to go wherever folk wish. I’ll start off eschewing spoilers, but I have no objection to them.

The first book really impressed both my wife and me. We read it - and watched the series - relatively recently. We are both quite liberal, and it impressed us as more “reasonable” than many dystopian fiction. This book was interesting, in that it was presented from the point of view of 3 different narrators. And the action was set several years into the future after the previous book.

But maybe it was the lack of novelty, but it impressed me as somewhat lightweight. I whipped through it pretty quickly. It was a tad odd at times, trying to remember what I had remembered as from the prior book, as opposed to the TV series. And - to the extent that the 2d book takes place AFTER the TV series, I wonder how much it will/was intended to constrain the future progress of the series.

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I liked it, but I would agree it’s not an “OMG SUPER GREAT” book. I think Handmaid’s Tale was a hard act to follow, even for an author like Margaret Atwood. I also listened to the Nerdette Podcast review of it and agree with some of their feelings, though I didn’t hate it as much as they seemed to.

One caveat about me - I wasn’t super crazy about Handmaid’s Tale. I read it when it came out, and I was a teenager. I just thought it was “meh.” I do think that at the time I thought it was just crazytalk; the future wasn’t anywhere near that dim, a lot of these gender issues were already just gone. Basic dumb teenager thinking on my part, but at the same time, it shaped my views of the first book. So given that, I liked The Testaments better. I liked how it went into Lydia’s backstory - in fact, I wish it had just concentrated on that as the primary storyline. Gilead is a fascinating world, and I’d love to just have more about how it came to be, how people live in it, etc. etc.

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Yeah. I tried to start a thread last month, but I got sidetracked. I actually finished the book itself in a weekend. It does look like a lot of stuff has made it’s way into the show (like the cult of Baby Nicole), but it’s also very different. For example I didn’t picture TV Aunt Lydia when reading her chapters. I think TV Aunt Lydia is at least in part a believer, but book Aunt Lydia is motivated by pure self-interest instead of ideology. I can’t decide if that makes her more of a monster or not, but her collaboration with Mayday show’s she’s at least somewhat remorseful. Or she’s just decided to fuck it and hedge her bets in case she survives Gilead’s fall.

I enjoyed Gilead’s backstory and Atwood’s worldbuilding (although she’s still pretty unclear on things like the national hierarchy vs the local hierarchy in Boston, or if Boston is Gilead’s capital). It answered one big question I always had from reading the book (Gilead’s long term plans to replenish the Aunts). I like implication that for all the supposed power the Wives have behind the scenes they’re gradually being replaced by illiterate teenage girls. I have to admit I found Agne/Aunt Victoria’s story a lot more interesting than Daisy/Nicole’s, but they both revealed a lot about the book’s word. Daughters are targets from pretty appalling harassment & outright molestation, but just imagine how much worse things are for Econodaughters. :eek: And Gilead’s a big enough deal on the world stage that it has sympathizers everywhere, influences other countries against accepting refugees, and even is even allowed to send missionaries to Canada.

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I’ll listen once it’s on audio and I have time. No time to read, sadly. I miss reading.

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It WAS a pretty quick read. I agree as to the lack of clarity as to local vs national hierarchy. If the Aunts’ Center oversaw all of Gilead, there was ZERO mention of staffing regional/local offices, and NO mention of major cities other than (presumably) Boston. Along those lines, I didn’t get a good sense of HOW the society functioned. Where the goods were manufactured, who was keeping the lights on. I( know there were some mentions of trade and shortages. But there sure were a lot of people driving around in fancy cars, and standing around with guns. Would take A LOT of infrastructure to support those things.

Some aspects of Testaments were just poorly written - by any standards. One that really stands out was near the end, when the one aunt was comatose after having been knocked out. Aunt Lydia goes to visit her, and after dismissing the other 2 aunts who were watching her, the plot unfolds in IIRC 3 or 4 sentences along the lines of:

Aunt Lydia leaned in and said, “Wake up.”

Aunt __ opened her eyes, and said, “I know what you did. You will pay for it.”

Aunt Lydia said, “Go back to sleep.” - and Aunt __ did.

Seriously?

And at the end, the girls get tossed off the boat, they paddle for hours in a rough sea, and they end up right at the beach where the other main characters are waiting for them?

I think the 2d book ended up a little too tidily, w/ a feel-good ending. Don’t get me wrong - I like happy endings. But this was just a little too neat.

Seems to suggest Gilead’s reign was quite short, but I did not get a clear idea of how long. The first book was written in 1980s. Assuming the events were in the near future, we could say the takeover was around 1990-2000. The Testaments takes place - what - 16 or so years in the future? And by the end, the seeds of Gilead’s downfall are well planted. How long would the purges and such take? So that suggests to me that the entire reign of Gilead was <50 yrs - possibly MUCH less. The conference at the end was in 2197, and referred to events having occurred “decades” in the past.

Another thing I was really interested in was the lives of the worker bees. What were they called? The novels only really addressed the super elite. From the TV show, it didn’t look like an average worker had a HORRIBLE life. They had jobs, decent apartments, families… And in some areas, they exercised considerable autonomy - even defiance of authority. Not to undervalue the negative aspects of authoritarianism, but they were far from slaves.

The 2d book did a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy of many of the folk who went along with the overthrow. But I thought they painted them a little too broadly as monsters. They didn’t have to be pedophiles, or serial wife murderers… Aunt Lydia was interestingly portrayed in the Testament. I think the TV show did a good job of portraying how the wives and other women might feel after losing their prior lives - including women who had supported the movement that ended up taking away their rights.

What appealed to me was that the society was not incredibly different from our reality. It didn’t depend on aliens, zombies, nuclear war… For me, that made it more interesting that other dystopias in terms of thinking what it would be like to try to react to such developments.

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I’m currently working my way through it, though I don’t have a lot of time to read nowadays. I’m enjoying it so far, though. I’m particularly enjoying Aunt Lydia’s backstory.

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I just finished the book and hope maybe someone is still interested in discussing it.

Ditto what others have said about it being a quick read. I don’t know how many pages it is in standard print size - I read the large print version- but it only took me a few hours here and there over the course of four days or so (contrasted by the fact that it took six months to get it from the library).

I found the tone very much different from THT. It’s very possible that my perception is colored not only from having watched the tv series but the fact that I read the first book in the 1980s. THT was eerie, and forboding and the world it was describing was unimaginable, whereas, though Gilead is certainly no amusement park, I guess I’m “used to it” and so there’s a bit less tension. Anyway, I almost got the sense MA wrote it with the tv series in mind. It has a very “action Movie” feel, much like the second season of the series did.

The framing of the story with the three points of view was effective. Aunt Lydia is fascinating. Such a monster yet her own moral code. At first I was picturing TV Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) but then a some point it was Margaret Atwood herself in my mind’s eye.

Apologies for referring to the tv show so much; it’s hard to separate the two.

Now for my stupid questions:

Is Agnes/Aunt Victoria June and Luke’s daughter (Hannah?)?
Was Commander Judd mentioned in the first book or tv series?

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It is very strongly implied by the epilogue academic saying “hey, maybe this Offred character and this Baby Nicole are connected somehow, but it’s lost to the mists of time”, and I believe that connection is consistent with everything in both the book and at least the first season of the show (I haven’t seen the other seasons). So, yes, absolutely 100%, but also not technically stated as such and deniably so.

I enjoyed the book, particularly Aunt Lydia’s story, but I consider it have many more flaws than the original. I agree with much of what has been said here. I was disappointed that the story focused almost entirely on the elite. Handmaid’s tale felt like a tiny view into a larger world. This story made the world seem quite small. There’s one city, and all the important people live in it, and everyone else is a barely two-dimensional prop.

Lydia’s story was compelling, and I’d have liked it much better if we got her story, the story of an econowife, the story of Shunammite as a wife who wasn’t just a prop for wanton male cruelty, and the story of one of the new Aunts who is maybe barely seeing daylight through her indoctrination under to Lydia’s careful hand. Maybe also the story of baby Nicole in Canada on the run.

I’d have been happy to dispense with the main espionage plan entirely. It felt rushed and forced and the necessarily limited cast of characters made the world seem very small. I’d have preferred a more open-ended ending like The Handmaid’s tale

I had to look up who Shunammite was in the Bible, and I did enjoy the symbolism there. She’s one of the few women in the Old Testament who has a name apart from her husband (not just “the wife of so-and-so”). And when widowed, she found that someone had taken her lands, but was restored them through the intervention of Elisha.

I thought the epilogue was weird and unnecessary and distracting, and apparently had totally forgotten that The Handmaid’s Tale ends with a similar epilogue.

Also, for those who enjoy Atwood and haven’t read Oryx and Crake, I strongly recommend it. I wouldn’t bother with the sequels.