I just finished "The Testaments" by Margaret Atwood, her sequel to the highly popular Handmaid's Tale.
The ending of the book describes a symposium where academics discuss what happened to Gilead many years later. Gilead is the setting for the story in The Testaments. I love this technique because the story is at once immediate, but also gives the feeling of the waxing and waning of the tides of history.
Many moons ago, a friend had recommended I read Margaret Atwood, and I had filed that recommendation away for future reference.
This
the first book by her that I have read and she is a very fine writer! I
was a little apprehensive that she might be a "eat your spinach" kind
of author. I was delighted to discover that her writing is quite
accessible, propulsive, thoughtful and provocative.
She draws upon Jean Jacques Rousseau's warning that a theocratic dictatorship
is the worst sort, to spin out this story, a female point of view story
similar to George Orwell's 1984. (She wrote the original Handmaid's
Tale in 1984 as an homage to Orwell's book).
The Testaments perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the MeToo era ....
The ending of the book describes a symposium where academics discuss what happened to Gilead many years later. Gilead is the setting for the story in The Testaments. I love this technique because the story is at once immediate, but also gives the feeling of the waxing and waning of the tides of history.
I recommend it.
I also recommend the author's interview on BBC's Desert Island Discs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00937l3
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