It has been over 30 years years since Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her widely acclaimed dystopian novel that follows a young woman known as Offred as the world she’s always known is obliterated by Gilead, a brutally patriarchal regime. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” women are split up into categories — Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Jezebels, Unwomen and Handmaids — and are forced to adhere to the rules that men have decreed for them. It’s a masterpiece, one that set high standards for its highly anticipated sequel, “The Testaments,” released this year — a novel that also had to take into consideration the narrative paths taken by the popular eponymous Hulu adaptation.
Taking place some 15 years after Offred’s story abruptly ends in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments” is narrated by three women. Two of them are teenagers who have known no other life than one in which Gilead plays a central role. Daisy, a Canadian teenager, was smuggled out of Gilead as a baby and has a much larger role to play than she initially wants. Agnes begins to question aspects of Gilead in her adolescence, as the pious words of adults start to ring hollow against a backdrop of acute suffering, punishment, and the withholding of valuable knowledge.
The third narrator, whose traitorous testimony is written in secret, is one of the architects of Gilead’s private sphere: Aunt Lydia. Though these various testimonies are a slightly contrived way to tell a story, especially one weighted with so much cultural capital, Atwood is a profound thinker and a wonderful storyteller. The transparency of her narrative devices doesn’t detract from her power, even if it does occasionally make it harder to ignore the influence that the show had on the book.
Spoiler alerts from this point on
Revealing Aunt Lydia to be secretly working against Gilead is the most daring — or glaring, depending on how exculpatory you think it is — choice Atwood makes in “The Testaments,” but the criticism that this move has earned her may be misdirected disappointment. Those who disapprove of what they see as Aunt Lydia’s exoneration are primarily rejecting the idea that even problematic women can be working toward some kind of greater good. But this is a reductive reading of Atwood’s storytelling, which often dwells in contradictions. Martyrs, messiahs and megalomaniacs are easy to grapple with. Real people are harder.
Though the epilogue of “The Handmaid’s Tale” does indicate that Gilead has disintegrated, there are clues that underlying sexist ideologies have not; Offred’s story is used rather flippantly as a means to understanding the powerful male leaders of Gilead, who (we’re told) must be observed and understood by a different moral code than our contemporary one. It’s a shrewd, biting ending that slowly burns its way out. “The Testaments” ends with a more potent note of hope, cut with the ache of lives lost and the knowledge that our memories of certain battles are only precariously passed on, and in such faulty ways. Atwood’s ability to understand the political power within the complicated relationship between history and memory stuns me every time.
“The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood is available widely wherever books are sold.
