With the hindsight of history, the Booker misses plenty of tricks. In 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most vital and prescient works of modern fiction, was pipped to the prize by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. With Margaret Atwood now elevated to the status of a contemporary prophet, 2019 may have seemed like an opportunity to redress that mistake. Published with all the fanfare of a new Harry Potter and accounting for 86% of shortlist sales, her sequel has dominated this year’s award, sprinkling some much-needed publishing glitz.
The Testaments is a fascinating follow-up to Atwood’s initial story of Gilead, giving sharp insights into power and collusion through Aunt Lydia’s confession of her role in the theocratic regime. As Atwood has said, with women’s rights increasingly under threat in the US, the world seems to be moving closer to Gilead rather than further away. The book is gripping, pacy and beautifully written, though later sections in which two young women take on the patriarchy devolve into action-adventure closer to the spinoff television series than to the austere mood of Atwood’s original.
But another novel called to the judges, too, leading to the shock decision to “break the rules”, as the Booker’s literary director Gaby Wood complained at the press conference, by sharing the prize between Atwood and the British author Bernardine Evaristo, whose Girl, Woman, Other is a landmark in fiction of a different kind. Read more