So much of the detail of the times and life in Gilead are justified in the same sentence in which the detail is introduced.
I suspect Atwood believed the images, the ‘look’ of the story and characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV version, would satisfy the reader’s need to ‘see’ it. This happened, then that happened, then this happened, with dialogue peppered through the narrative like herbs sprinkled on a salad.
Fiction is made up of three components: narrative, description, and dialogue.There are three reasons why I think this is not a good book and the Booker Prize judges made a very big mistake. In a 2018 ad for Masterclass – an online teaching platform that Atwood signed up to teach creative writing – she says that all the bad things in The Handmaid’s Tale happened “in real life somewhere at some time … I didn’t make them up.” She also says that “as a writer, your goal is to keep your reader believing in your story even though both of you know it’s fiction.” I always knew The Testaments was fiction I didn’t believe a word of it. I suspect it was the success of the television version that sparked Atwood, and/or her publishers, to embark on a ‘sequel’. Timing is everything, coming as it did in the wake of the #metoo movement. There was a 1990 movie of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Elizabeth McGovern, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and penned by Harold Pinter which was not a success (it only made 5 million back on its 13 million budget) but the television (streaming) version of the book which first aired in 2017 was a runaway success. The Testaments starts fifteen years after the story of Offred, the handmaid, and is a trio of narratives, the three (written) testaments: a young girl raised in Canada, a young girl raised in Gilead, and Aunt Lydia, the villainous trainer ‘Aunt’ in the original story she is the only continuing character. Yes, this is a sequel to The HandMaid’s Tale (1985) but it is not a continuation of the story.
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