Bronwyn Averett

It’s happened. I finally got around to my inevitable encounter with The Handmaid’s Tale & The Testaments. This might not seem remarkable but it always struck me as a significant missing piece of my personal literary canon, given that I’m something of an Atwood completist (The Penelopiad, anyone?).

What can I say? I just never got around to it…

I have mixed feelings about audiobooks. I still haven’t figured out what the purpose of them is, or why I like them… I float between thinking that they’re a good way to consume the non-fiction that I (as a sleep-deprived person) simply can’t stay awake for, and thinking that they’re a fun way to pass the time while folding laundry and should be the exclusive territory of genre (mysteries and fantasies are my favourite).

But some productions prove that audiobooks are not merely “books on tape” but are, in fact, capable of transposing a book into a different genre entirely. Such is the case for these renditions of Atwood’s two (arguably) most famous works.

Claire Danes as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale delivers what Claire Danes does best: an emotionally stark, deeply personal, forceful and vulnerable performance. What she captures best about this character is her ambivalence. You feel at any moment she will start the revolution and at the same time, she is painstakingly well behaved. She’s no martyr, no fool, no hero, and no snitch. She has a dead-inside-ness that would characterize anyone in her circumstances, and yet…and yet… That little spark of hope and rebellion.

She is the narrator not only of her life but of a world. She tells it plainly and that is her role. Not to change the system but to recount, in detail, her plight. She is the witness.

The Testaments, perhaps even more so, provides an impactful audio experience, as it navigates between multiple perspectives. One cannot hear the voice of Margaret Atwood announcing chapter numbers without feeling the deep weight of the 34 years that separate the two novels… The fact that much of the novel is told from the perspective of Aunt Lydia (narrated brilliantly by Ann Dowd, who reprises her role from the TV series) leads one to feel viscerally the fact that this book was written by a woman who has been made profoundly wise by her years in this often tragic world.

Two young women offer opposite perspectives, life in Gilead (as an Aunt-in-training) vs. life in Canada (as a normal-regular-girl until she realizes she’s the adoptive-daughter-of-two-Gilead-resistence-workers). These voices are perfectly cast. I can only assume that the choice of Mae Whitman as Daisy (Nicole) was based off her performance in Good Girls, and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Agnes Jemima (Aunt Victoria) was inspired by her role in The Village. The contrast of these two voices, who slowly but surely approach each other and come together with something like combustion, is a tension that I am sure carries through in the written form but is absolutely stunning in the audiobook format.

There are plenty of interesting think pieces you can read on these two books if you’d like. That’s not my scope here.

But before I leave you I did want to reflect a little on the uncanny prescience of Margaret Atwood.

On July 10, 2022, with the world still reeling from the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the USA, @thereadmargaretatwood published this photo on instagram:

Of course, what is profoundly disturbing about the caption is that she did, in many ways, “tell us so” – The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1985, when I assume the late-second wave of feminism took women’s bodily autonomy to be a semi-foregone conclusion.

Atwood’s book, which of course enjoyed critical success at the time of its publication, but which is now a touchstone of the political zeitgeist, could presumably more easily be put in the category of “dystopian” in the 80s. Obviously the same category holds, but the Republic of Gilead is starting to feel all too real to us.

The reason I bring this up is because I have a deep fascination Atwood’s sharp divining abilities. When I read Oryx and Crake, for example, in 2003, and the internet was still a brave new egalitarian world, its portrayal of society seemed far-fetched. When I re-read it in 2013, the age of social media, youtube, a vast wealth of pornography on the internet and the ever-looming thread of widespread viruses (either digital or biological), its plot seemed inevitable.

Obviously this is disturbing. But the best we can do is to pay attention to the voices of our fiction writers. Instead of being grateful that we do not live in the realms they describe, we should be attentive to the fact that they are imminently possible.

This week, while in Los Angeles, I visited the Broad, and saw several works by Robbie Conal, including “It Can’t Happen Here” (also, of course, the the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopian novel).

But it can happen here. It happens here all the time.