A testament to women’s power

THE TESTAMENTS ★★★★ by Margaret Atwood Chatto & Windus, £20

THIRTY-FIVE years is a long time to wait for a sequel. It’s not quite Harper Lee territory but it’s not far off. So when Margaret Atwood announced she was writing The Testaments, the follow-up to her classic dystopian novel

The Handmaid’s Tale, levels of expectation and hype were high.

This is partly because the totalitarian world of

The Handmaid’s Tale now seems eerily prescient.

It may be decades since Atwood first wrote about Gilead but in some respects the brutal state where women’s rights have been obliterated by a puritanical theocratic government feels closer now than it did in 1985 when The Handmaid’s Tale was published.

In fact, the red dresses and white winged bonnets worn by handmaids have become a sort of unofficial uniform at protests and marches around the world, and Atwood herself said one

influence for the book was “the world we have been living in”.

The Testaments begins 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, when Offred was bundled into a van, her future uncertain.

This time, Atwood uses the voices of three women to tell the story: Aunt Lydia, who we first met as the cattle prod-wielding enforcer who rules over Offred and the handmaids; Agnes, a young girl growing up in Gilead who knows nothing but the regime’s rules and restrictions; and Daisy, a teenager who lives in Canada. Her parents have close links to Mayday, the underground resistance movement that is working to bring down the state of Gilead.

Aunt Lydia is now revered as a quasi-saint in Gilead, the novel opening with her unveiling a statue of herself where followers leave offerings and prayers at her feet.

But like many aspects of Gilead, what you see externally doesn’t match what’s going on within. Aunt Lydia is secretly writing her own story to expose corruption in Gilead and bring down the barbaric regime.

We learn that she was a judge until she was arrested in the early days of the regime.The process that transforms her from judge to Aunt is as brutal as you would expect from Gilead and begs the question of how much anyone could withstand before falling in line.

“Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching,” she remarks.

Agnes and Daisy’s stories show life inside and outside the state and, as the novel progresses, the three characters overlap and it transpires they have more in common than they first realise.

The Testaments doesn’t have the gut-wrenching impact of The Handmaid’s Tale but it provides a satisfying and surprisingly hopeful conclusion.

It is the women of Gilead who, in the end, are responsible for its downfall and at its heart, this gripping novel is a rallying call for action.

As Daisy is told: “Yuck won’t change the world.You need to get your hands dirty. Add some guts and grit.”

In Atwood’s world, resistance is never futile.