Book Review - The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sequels disappoint and this is no exception. Sequels can never equal or transcend the original – unless they have been planned as linear shorter forms of an ungainly epic. To milk the popularity of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments has been written after nearly three decades.
Margaret Atwood’s forte is dystopic future scenarios – as seen in the palindromic Maddaddam Trilogy Series 3 Books Collection Set By Margaret Atwood.
Gilead is a near future misogynistic Christian theocratic state – Biblical sayings justify the ‘use’ of Handmaids Rachel said to Jacob: “Here is my maid Bilhah; go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her.” Out of this arrangement, Bilhah gave Jacob two sons and became the mother of Dan and Naphtali (Gen. 30:3-8). Ideas borrowed from Islamic Sharia turn women into mere chattels.

Even with grown women, four female witnesses are equivalent of one male, here in Gilead.

Hair was permitted inside a dwelling unless there were men around, because men had a thing about hair, it made them spin out of control, they said. And my hair was particularly inflammatory because it was greenish.

There are even echoes of Fahrenheit 451

There was no lettering on the stores – only pictures on the signs. A boot, a fish, a tooth.

Censorship and imagined prurience by the self-appointed moral police attains ridiculous levels:

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

Much to my chagrin, I witnessed this phenomenon a couple of decades ago in Saudi Arabia.
The narrative putters along, but then speed increases exponentially – almost as if the author was in a hurry to finish the arduous task of spinning the tale.

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