Hey everyone I'm crashing into the Waterstones vlog schedule with obviously
a very special book, a very special day, a book that a lot of people have been waiting for
for a very long time. It is later on today the midnight
opening of shops all over the country to see the arrival of The Testaments by
Margaret Atwood, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. And here it is.
Yes, here is a copy which I managed to get to read over this weekend and I'm
here with a spoiler-free review. Now what do I mean by spoiler-free? I don't want
to sort of upset anybody or ruin anything for anybody
with this book so I will not be discussing any thing to do with the plot
I will not even be talking about who it's narrated by. I will be avoiding all
of that I hope because I don't want to ruin the reading experience for anybody.
There are of course reviews out there, there's bits of information out there,
but I'm gonna try and keep this as sort of vague and thematic as possible and
not ruin your reading experience. The first thing to say I suppose is that it
is so good to have Margaret Atwood back at the controls. And what I mean by that
is of course that a lot of us have been watching the TV series. I actually
watched the first season of The Handmaid's Tale, I watched a bit of the second
season and it started to veer off in a direction that made me feel very
uncomfortable and I wasn't enjoying it and I decided
to stop watching it. And that's partly because of course it was going beyond
the original book and there was something about the way that some of the
female characters were being framed that I found very uncomfortable so I left the
TV series. So picking up The Testaments and what we can say is that Margaret Atwood has
said that she wrote this book in response to the many questions that she
gets all the time about what happens next
in Gilead and of course how Gilead falls. And that is I suppose what this book
does deal with. We do know, I think this is common knowledge, that it is set about 15
years after the end of the Handmaid's Tale. So having her back at the
controls, what I mean by that is that from the first page there is that very
familiar sort of tone and handling from Margaret Atwood
which means that I just felt my shoulders relax. I was like, yes, she's
telling the story, she's in control of it and I knew that we are in very good
hands. It's sort of remarkable to me that an author like Margaret Atwood who's
been writing for so many years, she'll be 80 later on this year, the
clarity with which she writes is really, really impressive. And as I say right
from the very first page you know where you are and what's going on and it feels
very, very good to be in her hands. What can we say about what's contained
within this book? Well, I suppose as I say, it does answer some
of those really fundamental questions. And if you think about when we look at
dystopian fiction or speculative fiction or fiction that looks at sort of
totalitarian or oppressive regimes there are some questions that will come up
again and again and again. Which is how do these things come to be? How do these
states rise? How do these people come to power? And looking around the world today
this is a question that we should all be asking ourselves because of the rise and
falls of various political movements. Do these things happen insidiously? Do they
happen quickly? Do they happen slowly? What should we be doing as citizens to
keep our eyes open to make sure that we don't suddenly find ourselves in Gilead?
And I think that's one of the really really interesting ways to read this
book, is that idea of seeing how these things happen and what we need to
be on guard against. And of course that leads to another question which is what
will people do to survive within a sort of oppressive regime like that?
And that's a really interesting question. Are you the kind of person that would roll
over and do whatever you were asked to do? Are you the kind of person that would
resist? Are you the kind of person that would be frozen by inaction. Are you the kind of
person that would bend slightly and survive in order to either just keep
your head down and make sure that you don't die or be the kind of person that
would do that in order to somehow effect change later on. And I think that's a
really interesting way of reading the book. And as I say all of this applies to
the world today and that's one of the most amazing things about this book and
of courseThe Handmaid's Tale previously, is that whilst it is speculative fiction
and whilst it might seem to be beyond the realms of
possibility, it really isn't. If you look at some of the things that are happening in
America at the moment, if you look at some of the rises of populist
regimes around Europe, if you look at just politics in general around the
world; it can be very quickly that things can change and people suddenly find
themselves living in a very different society to the one that they may have
grown up in. And that's sort of equally terrifying and stimulating I suppose as
you're reading. And I suppose at the end of all of this
what you're left with is this sense, this sort of notion about action. It's about
being aware, being alert and never believing that the situation that you're
in is beyond repair. That there is always something that can be done to change
things for the better. And so in a way it's sort of it's about
activism, it's about action. It's about camaraderie, it's about
working together with other people. And that means that there is this kind of
optimistic tone in this book, there is something in there about believing that
I suppose resistance if you're in that situation or working together with
others, finding common goals with others and being able to do something about
even the most hopeless situations is possible. And I suppose that's something
that I find myself reading about in historical books looking at the past. So
that no matter how awful the situation was there was always somebody
or a group of people who believed that they could make a difference. And so it's
quite interesting to see that same theme being put into the sort of the future if
you like. And it's something for us all to bear in mind wherever we are whatever
happens to be going on in our own domestic politics or indeed politics
internationally. That it is always ordinary people who can make the biggest
difference and change even the most sort of hard set and oppressive regimes in
history. They have all toppled and it has all been because of people. Not sort of
anything more extraordinary than that, just ordinary people doing something. So that
is quite a nice thing to take away from this book. I think it's going
to be a hugely popular read. I hope I haven't spoiled anything by talking to
you about it rather generally. As I say, midnight tonight some Waterstones
shops will be opening to put the book on sale but from tomorrow, the 10th of
September it will be available for everybody to read and it's an absolute
treat. So there we go. That is The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. I hope you
enjoy it and I will be back on the normal vlog schedule sometime soon
but until then take care.