Paul Fulcher's Reviews > The Testaments

Here I also keep another set of files, accessible only to a very few; I think of them as the secret histories of Gilead. All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power.
Aunt Lydia

It was an “extraordinarily complicated process” to get copies of the manuscript, which is protected by a “ferocious” non-disclosure agreement.
Chair of Booker Judges as told to the Guardian

When, in 2197, the Thirteenth Symposium on Amazonian Studies takes place, the assembled historians, looking for evidence of the Great Amazon PRH war, will pore over the details of the launch of The Testaments as one of the first skirmishes that signalled the epic conflict to come.

With a midnight launch planned by PRH for September 9th 2019, a plan with which the Amazonias had officially concurred, suddenly on September 3rd the Twittersphere was set ablaze by two separate breaches of the agreement.

Select Agents of the mysterious Prime organisation had been sent copies of the top-secret document, although the Amazon empire denied any deliberate malpractice and even, although only once it was too late to remedy the situation, issued a, nearly unprecedented, apology via diplomatic channels.

Simultaneously media outlets in the free world began to release details of The Testaments, despite a worldwide embargo, the first from the publicly funded NPR, quickly followed by the Washington Post and New York Times, each competing to reveal as many of the secrets as possible. How this information was shared despite a strict worldwide embargo remains unclear, but a microdot may have played a part:

“Microdot?” I asked. “What is that?”
“An old technology that has fallen into disuse, but that is still perfectly viable. Documents are photographed with a miniature camera that reduces them to microscopic size. Then they are printed on minute plastic dots, which can be applied to almost any surface and read by the recipient with a custom viewer small enough to be concealed in, for instance, a pen.”
“Astonishing,” I exclaimed. “Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say ‘Pen Is Envy.’”

It was a fascinating saga, which is unfortunately rather more than (that one good joke aside) I can say for the book itself. Atwood was once an author whose books I eagerly awaited but this, after Hag Seed and The Heart That Goes Last, is the third major disappointment of recent years.

Ultimately Atwood appears to be trying to please too many audiences at once: those who have been waiting 35 years for a sequel to the Handmaid's Tale, and forming their own theories in the meantime: fans of the TV series (who feel the primary target); and prize judges swayed by ferocious NDAs. Indeed there are some quite clever nods to each group that will pass others by. But the net effect is to leave this literary fiction fan distinctly underwhelmed. The end result has cardboard characters (a cliched teenager who seems completely unphased by the death of her parents in a terrorist attack, rapidly followed by being told they weren't her real parents), a hokey plot (as pointed out by Gumble's Yard, the infamous resistance organisation Mayday has as its password ... Mayday?!) and a tedious drip..drip..drip of revelations that are obvious to the reader well beforehand (to be fair not helped by the fact that all the early embargo breaking press reviews competed to reveal as much of the plot as possible).

1.5 stars rounded up to 2 for the fun of the botched launch.