Book of the week

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus, $48)

Thirty-four years is a while to wait for a follow-up. Margaret Atwood has written a sequel for The Handmaid’s Tale, her 1985 hit dystopian novel, in part to meet the clamour of that book’s fans, who – fuelled by three seasons of the TV adaptation – are desperate to know what would happen to its heroine Offred, and how Gilead, the sinister version of the near-future United States which has subjugated her, might possibly combust.

The result is The Testaments, probably the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year both sides of the Atlantic, and the subject of excitable leaks.

True to her mandate, Atwood has given us a blockbuster of propulsive, almost breathless narrative, stacked with twists and turns worthy of a Gothic novel.

Its characters are as lurid and schematic as its clever front-cover image, but, like the jacket picture too, impressive in their gestural efficiency.

Because everyone can recognise that bonnet now: the wide, deep hat – shorthand for the puritanical Gilead and its misogynistic mores –

has so permeated our culture that Kylie Jenner mistook it for a fashion item.

So too, we quickly pick up the functions of our key players in The Testaments.

There’s not one narrator now but three: Offred’s two daughters Nicole and Agnes and the terrifying Aunt Lydia, the ruthless enforcer of female oppression from The Handmaid’s Tale.

The two (good, brave) girls have almost interchangeable personalities; Aunt Lydia is the more interesting, her commitment to the dark side an expedient survival tactic we are invited to sympathise with.

Atwood’s book has the dramatic thrust and power to shock to scorch the memory.

But most shorthand are the male characters.

They are almost uniformly abhorrent, with a paedophile and a near-paedophile chief among them. It doesn’t seem so much that this book is describing a corrupted world view that has resulted in distorted sexuality but that it really hates men.

Is there a conscious reference here to the male predatoriness that has stalked our news pages since #MeToo reared it head?

I think Atwood is not making such a direct analogy: the whole effectiveness of Gilead as an idea has been that its abuses and tortures have always been cut and pasted from the real world, even before the rise of a religious lobby in America among other things, gave them a new relevance.

The oppressed feminist shriek of the first novel gets its more optimistic echo in The Testaments. Atwood pulls from multiple literary antecedents, be it the 19thcentury novelists the book mentions (Hardy and Bronte among them) or more recent dystopian work, a melodramatic, near hysterical tale that ultimately, rather pleasingly, suggests a world where women pull the strings after all.

John Lanchester’s The Wall, which shared a place on the Booker Longlist with The Testaments but didn’t join it on the shortlist, is the more elegant piece of dystopian fiction.

But it is Atwood’s book that has the dramatic thrust and power to shock to scorch the memory.