Review of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments

Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course where we studied the text in-depth, so it was relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series. People who watch it may make different connections to The Testaments than I did and react differently.

The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a baby. One of the four head Aunts complicit in imposing the strict regime of oppression on the women of Gilead is the second storyteller. The final narrator is a teenager who grew up in Gilead and joined the Aunts to flee an attempted arranged marriage.

The story has a plot which the author does not fully explain. Atwood leaves it up to the reader to work out why some things happen rather than have one of the characters tell the reader why she is doing something. For example, I wondered why the Aunt chose a particular courier to smuggle documents out of Gilead. A reader looking for plot holes might think they had found one, as it took me a while to figure out why that particular courier was chosen.

The novel switches back and forth between points of view, but unlike many books that use this technique, I wasn't troubled by the frequent change of viewpoint as I was keen to learn more about that person’s story. This indicates that all the storylines were equally important and not dominated by one main storyline with interrupting subplots.

I found the novel a real page-turner, reading its 400 pages in five sittings, which is quick for me. I particularly enjoyed discovering more about how Gilead came into being and the origins and motivations of the original Aunts.

The Testaments’ words flow off the page. Atwood is very much a writer who writes for readers. She would rather impress with her ideas, themes and story than with her clever word usage. I have read four of her other novels, including the excellent Maddaddam trilogy, so she is one of my favourite authors.

The Testaments has a much more definite ending than the somewhat ambiguous finish of The Handmaid’s Tale. Overall, I think The Testaments is an excellent end to the world of Gilead, but it is not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, which created Gilead and the belief system imposed on the people there. I think The Handmaid’s Tale would have been a more worthy winner of the Booker Prize. But The Testaments is still a great novel by a great speculative fiction writer.

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read non-genre literature to see what the other side is up to. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors. This is a review of Purity, the fourth of his novels that I have read.

Purity’s plot revolves around secrets, with one secret being the main character’s search for the identity of her father and another about a cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of a journalism job. She was raised by a controlling but loving mother who always got her way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down, as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an investigative journal. While Leila is a hard-nosed reporter who works for Tom. They are lovers, even though she is married.

When Wolf offers Purity a job that requires her to relocate to his secret base in Bolivia, the lives of the four main characters go from circling each other to intermingling. But each of them is so caught up in their own sense of what is morally right that they find it hard, in some cases impossible, to share their lives with others. In Franzen’s critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, the characters were trying to hide their true selves from the world. Similarly in Purity, the characters, for the most part, are controlled by their secrets.

As usual, Franzen divides the novel into lengthy sections told from one of the four character’s points of view. Franzen spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads as they attempt to justify their actions and reminisce on what they have done. I particularly found Andreas Wolf’s life as a church councillor in East Germany compelling as he tried to stay under the radar of the Stasi, even though his father was a high-ranking East German official. When Andreas “escapes” from East Germany, his secrets ensure he is never free.

But the story revolves around Purity and her search for the identity of her father. Her strict upbringing by her mother and lack of a father leaves her longing for a father figure. This leads to a desire for a relationship with older men, be it the older married man living in her share house, or perhaps Andreas Wolf, or… While searching for her father and love, she leads an otherwise aimless existence ruled by cynicism.

I very much enjoyed being in the heads of the main characters. Their search for an ethical meaning to life had me often contemplating my own machinations on life. As I read, I pondered the possible consequences of their secrets being exposed and was frequently surprised with what happened. While not in the same class as The Corrections, Purity is a very entertaining and thought provoking read.

I'm back.

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since I posted, I have been busy, sick and slack. I plan to write a few more blog posts this year. As usual they will be mainly about writing and science fiction, concentrating on apocalyptic and time-travel fiction. But first a bit of a summary of 2019, my annus horribilis.

2019

2019 started with my finishing three very challenging years of study with a BA in Internet Communications in early March. The degree was easily the hardest study I had done. Way harder than my Master of Creative Writing. I think its difficulty was due to the combination of doing web-design subjects, (I had virtually no knowledge of even html) and getting used to the “Arts” way of thinking, with its huge emphasis on well researched and argued essays. Due to the nature of the degree, I also had to learn many software packages and web platforms, like video editing software to create video mashups for assignments.

I should have been happy when I completed my degree, as I did extremely well, getting distinctions or high-distinctions for all of its 24 subjects. But, unfortunately I had developed a health problem over the three final months of my degree called diabetic lumbosacral plexopathy (what an imposing name). Basically, I had neglected my diabetes due to the degree being full on, with no breaks between 13 week study periods for three years.

I had managed to keep up my extensive exercise regime (well I think it was extensive), which included swimming 3ks three times a week, weights three times a week, 5k walks four times a week, exercises four times a week. But my blood sugar had stayed high due to neglecting my diet and sleep (lack of sleep raises a person’s blood sugar) while doing the degree. As a result, the plexopathy caused my right knee to give way without warning while standing or walking on five or six occasions. I had lost a lot of weight, mainly in the form of muscle, like my bum (the biggest muscle in the body, I think) shrank, even though it was not that noteworthy beforehand. My weight dropped to 72ks. But thankfully, after a neurologist set me on a course of immunoglobin infusions, and I started exercises from a physio, as well as getting my blood sugar under control, I am not falling over anymore and regaining my strength. My neurologist said I was one of the quickest to recover from the condition.

During the months it took to be diagnosed and then heal, I was concerned the left leg would suffer the same fate as the right and then I wouldn’t be able to walk anymore. I was using a walking stick for months and walking very stiff legged and slowly. I also was not sleeping, with worry about my health combining with totally stuffed up sleep patterns from my degree (I had frequently worked into the early morning at night.) So, the first three quarters of 2019 was one big health problem.
 
Eventually I improved. I am now starting to set up my own web-design business, another big challenge. I am currently working on the website for it, and on proposal for a website for a potential client, having already submitted a proposal for another website for the same client. I am also set to do a NEIS course, starting next week (bushfires permitting), where I learn a bit about setting up a business and I am subsidised by the government for its first nine months.  
 

Reading in 2019

 
During my degree I read a total of four fiction books, and all were for some writing electives I had done. Otherwise all my reading time was taken up with hundreds of research papers and a few text books. But once my degree finished in March, I started reading fiction again. A total of ten novels for the year, nine of them were science fiction, with the best being The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a near future Thailand in a world lacking traditional energy resources and suffering from climate change and famine. The Thais were trying to prevent the destruction of their traditional food sources from multinational genetic food corporations. The title of the novel refers to a much abused clone. I reviewed it in a previous post. 
 
The second best was This is How the World Ends, by James Morrow, which is part of the Masterworks series of classic science fiction novels. It’s a weird Phillip K. Dick type novel, set after the world has been destroyed in a nuclear war, where six survivors are put on trial for their part in causing the war in a court made up of people from the future who never lived due to the war (huh?).
 

Writing in 2019

 
I did very little writing during my degree, but my word count increased after I finished it. It is still nowhere near enough. I am currently about two-thirds of the way through the second draft of a apocalyptic science fiction novel that is just getting bigger and bigger as I get wrapped up in exploring the inner thoughts and fears of my main character. I am going to have to cut, slash and obliterate in the third draft as it risks ballooning out to 200,000 words.
 

2020

 
I plan to do a lot more writing this year as well as reading and fill this blog with insightful reviews of the novels I have read as well as tidbits about science, science fiction and writing.