Do we really need a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale? Of all the books Margaret Atwood has written in a long career of near-Victorian doggedness and prolixity, this worst-case scenario novel is felt to have the most contemporary resonances. In its spooky, anguished pages, America becomes a theocracy.
The puritans are back, baby, and they’re mad as hell. Women, especially the fertile Handmaids in their red dresses and white bonnets, are chattel, farmed for children in a world where ecological collapse rendered pregnancy deadly. This is Gilead, an atavistic tyranny sprung from the soil of New England. Down society slides to Salem, where the food sucks, war is endless, and dancing is banned.
Atwood’s already canonical dystopia, imagined in the ever so on-the-nose year of 1984, recently became a pop cultural supernova, emitting all the heat, light, and radiation you’d expect. Catalyst one was the election of Donald Trump and the cosmic discontent felt by millions of American women that resulted. The Handmaid’s Tale was no longer a warning, they believed, it was a prophecy. Catalyst two was, of course, a highly praised, successful television adaptation of the novel. The show propelled Atwood’s imagery and phrasemaking into the mainstream in a way that only prestige TV can. Now, that red Handmaid costume is a guaranteed sight at protest marches all over the world, a confusing symbol of both oppression and resistance.
In writing a sequel, The Testaments, Atwood was able to claw back some control over her material, answer a few questions, and return to familiar themes. Men and women, childhood and marriage, words and language, victims and executioners: these are the islands she’s quietly canoed around in her fiction for a long time. They are all present again. As ever, her prose is courteous, wise, allusive, mischievous, and only slightly cranky. But prose was never going to be the problem here.
The Handmaid’s Tale was about living through the construction of a totalitarian state. Its characters were in the first Gileadian generation: the founders, the bloodbathers, the long knifers. They are found in The Testaments, too, but we also meet characters who have grown up in Gilead, who have known nothing else. Across three solidly engineered first-person narratives, we learn how Gilead begins to fall apart.
At the core of The Testaments is the doughty figure of Aunt Lydia. This fearsome martinet was one of Atwood’s most memorable creations in the first novel. Charged with training the poor Handmaids, Lydia — wielding an electrified cattle prod — hovered over them, tearfully exhorting them to obey her. Here she is granted a backstory, interiority, and all kinds of prickly justifications. Lydia was once a family court judge, a professional woman like the women who’ll buy this book for their daughters.
When Gilead arrives at gunpoint, and after some grueling scenes of torture, Lydia becomes one of those figures who flourish in all totalitarian situations: an opportunist. “Better to hurl rocks,” she confesses, “than to have them hurled at you.” Atwood’s message appears, at this point, to be as clear as it was in The Handmaid’s Tale. History is not the smiling, forward march of progressive dogma. Atwood says to women: You could be coerced, deracinated, and forced into marriage; you could live out the worst pages of Hobbes and Sade. The inexorable beats of tyranny could numb your brain, first with terror and then with acceptance. And perhaps you, like Lydia, might be tempted to do something more active than mere acceptance.
The reader is just about on board with Lydia’s transformation. Atwood has complicated her, plausibly enough. But then we realize, heads shaking, that Lydia — secretly, furtively — is a rebel plotting against Gilead from the inside. Worst of all, she turns out to be another badass feminist action hero (“I will get you back for this,” Lydia thinks of her colleagues, and she does) of the kind so familiar in pop culture at the moment. She’s funny, too, full of zingers. With the whoosh and roar of a powerful vacuum, all the fear, all the dreadful tension of two novels is sucked away. It’s like finding out that Mullah Omar was a devoted collector of teddy bears.
After some zany adventures, a dash of fish-out-of-water comedy, and lots of frothy “teachable moment” plot turns, everything in Gilead turns out fine because Gilead no longer exists. The Handmaid’s Tale was crisp, menacing, and introspective; The Testaments is more of a yarn, a sensational adventure story. If the two novels were to have a conversation — and they must, after all — then they are speaking at cross purposes and slurring their words.
You wash up on the shore at the finish of this brisk read rather baffled about where you are and what it’s supposed to mean. All of Atwood’s characters are rebels in the end, which makes for quite a comforting dystopia. Vauvenargues’ desolate old maxim surely comes closer to the truth: “Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.” Under a truly nasty regime, the rebel is a particularly rare cockatoo, infrequently found among the rest of us, a flock of pigeons.
Atwood has said that she feels the United States is slipping toward Gilead. Those looking for evidence of this catastrophic vision will not find it in The Testaments, though that’s where many people, when they trade their placards for novels, are looking.
Will Lloyd is a freelance writer in London.
