Hamish Hamilton, 2019, 459 p

this book, joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, has an idiosyncratic typography

only proper nouns and titles of plays etc are given capital letters and there are no full stops

each sentence is set out as a separate paragraph, no matter how

short

neither are there any quotation marks to indicate dialogue

I suppose that last stricture goes to show that prose involving speech can be understood without them – but it certainly cuts out scope for comments in any pedant’s corner

nevertheless, I am at a loss as to what this way of setting out a story is supposed to be signifying, or what its purpose is beyond perhaps lending a sense of immediacy

maybe it was simply to make Girl, Woman, Other stand out from the pack.

The novel might be called a mosaic as it is told from twelve viewpoints, laid out, three to each, in four chapters, with a fifth multi-viewpoint chapter and Epilogue following on. Most of them, but not quite all, are women; some, but not all, are lesbians. There are connections between the narratives – mostly involving attendees at the first night of initial narrator Amma’s play The Last Amazon of Dahomey at the National.

It is the serious novel’s purpose to encapsulate society and Evaristo’s is certainly intended to be serious, dealing as it does with the forever fraught position of women through the ages (here from the 1890s on,) the perennial blight of man’s inhumanity to woman, the black experience (especially black women’s,) the endlessly changing meaning and practice of feminism but it is also subtle enough to illustrate that bad or controlling behaviour is not restricted to one sex.

The pieces of a mosaic laid side by side are intended to reveal a bigger picture and these do but perhaps in the manner of a jigsaw without its accompanying illustration and possibly with a few pieces missing. Then again, any individual novel can not capture the whole world.

Of Evaristo’s writing there can be little criticism. She embodies her narrators exquisitely and their psychologies are utterly believable. The things that happen to them and the way they behave are certainly plausible. That the Epilogue contrives a happy ending of sorts for two of them maybe goes against the grain of the foregoing but there can at times be shafts of light coming into the world.

Notwithstanding any of the above Girl, Woman, Other could not by any means be described as a rant. It is, simply, good fiction; doing what good fiction ought to do. Except in its depiction of the travails of women this book is about as far apart as it could be from its fellow Booker Prize sharer. Which only goes to show what a thankless task judging literary prizes must be.

Pedant’s corner:- “to provide captors for the abolished slave trade in the Americas, with outlaw slave ships outrunning the blockades to do business with him” (captives makes more sense,) “chomping at the bit” (the phrase is ‘champing’ at the bit,) “lips fulsome” (fulsome? Did Evaristo mean immoderately fawning/effusive or was she striving for an exaggeration of ‘full’?) “where Kofi did forty laps” (this was in a swimming pool; ‘forty lengths’ perhaps,) snuck (several times; sneaked,) “parking lot” (that would be a car park,) “after the sound of a thousand pairs of feet have stampeded” (this sentence’s subject, sound, is singular; so the verb ought to be ‘has stampeded’, but that would be an awkward construction. Rejig the sentence,) “when she did, the became friends” (they became friends,) “was sat” (was sitting,) “who was stood” (standing,) “the typical medley of buildings opposite are in silhouette” (the subject here is ‘medley’ which requires a singular verb form, not ‘are’. Rejig the sentence,) “get to know the lesbian thespians’” (I have no idea why thespians’ has that apostrophe. It’s a simple plural.)

Chatto & Windus, 2019, 453 p.

All religions are conspiracies against women. Theocracies even more so. Atwood’s conception of her repressive society of Gilead (in The Handmaid’s Tale and here) was not, I suspect, designed to illustrate that point in particular – rather than to suggest that advances in social arrangements can be reversed, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance – but nevertheless does so. The source book/“sacred” text of the relevant conspiracy may not even contain the words used to justify women’s subjection by those of that bent. They instead tend to pick out the bits that suit them or else distort its contents. That point is made here when one of the narrators is warned about the Bible that, “It doesn’t say what they say it does.”

I can’t actually remember much about the text of The Handmaid’s Tale (to which this is a companion rather than a sequel) beyond the theocratic authoritarianism and the sexual exploitation, except that the book didn’t have a firm resolution – it just ended.

The Testaments is different in that it is not just one recollection of life in Gilead but three, and we see the seeds of Gilead’s downfall being sown. One of the narrators is Agnes Jemima (in a transcript of the testimony of Witness 369A supposedly collected by the Mayday Resistance movement,) a daughter of Gilead, for which read the daughter of a handmaiden but legally of her Commander “father,” Kyle, and his wife Tabitha. Tabitha looked after Agnes’s interests but died and Commander Kyle took a new wife, Paula, who most emphatically did not. The first account we read, though, is from “The Ardua Hall Holograph” a manuscript found hidden in a book of Cardinal Newman’s writings. It was from the library of Ardua Hall, the headquarters of the Aunts who oversaw the lives of the women of Gilead. One of their functions was to keep track of the genetic heritage of Gilead’s children as so many’s may not have been what was generally thought. Uniquely among the women of Gilead, Aunts were allowed books. The Holograph was written by Aunt Lydia – whom we are to assume is the same Lydia described by Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Lydia knew where the regime’s secrets were buried and had a tacit agreement with Commander Judd, one of the prime movers of Gilead, that she should have a free hand in organising women’s lives in return for useful information. But pre-Gilead she had been a judge; in the Holograph she remembers her earlier life and the humiliations borne when that was blown apart and is only biding her time to expose all Gilead’s hypocrisies. The third strand (a transcript of the testimony of Witness 369B) is the story of a girl brought up in Toronto by a couple who ran a second-hand clothes business but were active in the Underground Femaleroad which spirited refugees away from Gilead and whom she felt were overly protective of her. (Minor spoiler next.) Frequent early mentions of Baby Nicole, a cause célèbre both in Gilead and Canada, a poster-child who was taken from her “parents” in Gilead and for whose return its government actively campaigned and whose Pearl Girls, sent out to convert Canadians to the Gilead way of life, were constantly on the lookout for, provide heavy hints as to her identity. Atwood intersperses the three testimonies expertly, though the connection between Agnes and Jade/Nicole feels a bit too pat. That though is justified by the book’s coda which, like the similar addendum to The Handmaid’s Tale, is formed of notes from a symposium on Gilead Studies, here the Thirteenth, held at Passamaquoddy (formerly Bangor,) Maine, in 2197.

In the Holograph Aunt Lydia tells us of her secret cache of proscribed books, which includes Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Paradise Lost and Lives of Girls and Women, but also that “Knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognised this, or to have capitalised on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.” The Holograph incidentally illustrates the jealousies and rivalries of a closed order and the intricacies of power relationships while Lydia’s acidity is shown by her inclusion in a list of “hoary chetsnuts” the aphorism that “Time wounds all heels.” In a neat touch by Atwood the meeting/eating place at Ardua Hall (whose slippery motto is Per Ardua Cum Estrus) is called the Schlafly Café.

Moments of horror in The Testaments are rare. There are mentions of Particicution, where convicts are torn to pieces by handmaids (a seemingly eagerly grabbed outlet for their justifiable anger,) but the descriptions tend to avoid detail. The experiences of Agnes and her friend Becca herself at the hands of Becca’s dentist father (with Becca it was more than hands) exemplify that an obsession with controlling sex, far from making it go away, (though those in control of course make sure they get more than their share,) only serves to emphasise its centrality to human experience, perhaps even accentuate sexuality’s unsavoury extremities.

As to the prohibition on women (except the Aunts) reading, Agnes in her spell at Ardua Hall gets to the heart of the matter, “Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to questions, and then to others.” In a theocracy, in any dictatorship, questions are to be avoided

Perhaps it was familiarity with the recent TV adaptation of the earlier book or the wider world demonstration that such a society is a likely goal for those who somehow feel the presence of women in the public sphere in some way disadvantages them The Testaments seemed a better structured, more rounded book than my memory of The Handmaid’s Tale. The three narrators are convincing, though Jade/Nicole doesn’t quite seem to realise the seriousness of the perils inside Gilead and Atwwod’s insights into human behaviour under stress are acute.

Pedant’s corner:- tête-a-têtes (strictly têtes-a-têtes, or even têtes-a-tête,) a missing comma at the end of a piece iof dialogue where the sentence continued after it.

Two articles caught my eye in Saturday’s Guardian Review.

The cover piece was by Naomi Alderman and discussed feminist Science Fiction with reference to its warning nature and the threat recent political events present to the potential of women being treated on an equal basis with men. Of particular interest here was the revelation to me of part of the background to Ursula Le Guin’s childhood where her parents had taken in the last survivor of the Native American Yani people about whom Le Guin’s mother wrote a book. The implication is that exposure to other ways of thinking than what otherwise surrounded her opened up perspectives which Le Guin was able to transform into her fiction. Margaret Atwood too spent parts of her childhood outside the comforts of civilisation, while Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr) travelled in Africa as a child coming into contact with various groups. Alderman uses the example of her own novel The Power to illustrate that the nature of a utopia/dystopia is dependent on viewpoint.

Further on there was an odd piece by Scarlett Thomas on her conversion to the delights and magic of children’s fiction.

What got me here was the sentence, “But it turns out that creating a fictional world is a very complex act” in a “who knew?” context.

Well, duh. Only every Science Fiction or fantasy writer who ever tried it.

Behind the sentence’s remarkable blindness presumably stood Thomas’s previous implicit view that such creators are not real writers and anything fantastical does not warrant serious attention.

Still, it seems she’s got over that now.