Praise be for this sequel
alive. Already I am petrified.”
That little pun is typical of Aunt Lydia’s wry wit, which endows “The Testaments” with far more humor than “The Handmaid’s Tale” or its exceedingly grim TV adaptation. This Aunt Lydia is publicly devout but privately defiant, outwardly pious but inwardly sardonic.
Writing in a journal at night in a library forbidden to all but a chosen few, Aunt Lydia reveals the story of her previous life, her traumatizing transition to the Republic of Gilead and her crafty political intrigue. She’s Sun Tzu and Machiavelli with a cup of cinnamon tea. Through a combination of good luck and her own ruthless instincts, she has survived and thrived to become the spider at the center of a vast web of “shameful information” to trap female competitors and intimidate her male superiors. Aunt Lydia is a mercurial assassin: a pious leader, a ruthless administrator, a deliciously acerbic confessor. “Whoever said consistency is a virtue?” she asks.
But Aunt Lydia is not the only narrator of “The Testaments.” Interlaced among her journal entries are the testimonies of two young women: one raised in Gilead, the other in Canada. Their mysterious identities fuel much of the story’s suspense — and electrify the novel with an extra dose of melodrama. Together, this trio of voices allows Atwood to include broader details about how other countries respond to the Republic of Gilead. Freed from the intense but narrow constraints of Offred’s point of view in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments” sketches out protest movements abroad, an underground railroad to ferry women north, the internecine conflicts rotting out the center of Gilead, and the Republic’s efforts to manipulate its image on the world stage.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” famously ends with the line, “Any questions?” And last November, Atwood told her 1.9 million Twitter followers that “The Testaments” was inspired by “everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings.” That certainly appears to be the case — the story is full of revealing back stories — but readers hoping for a complementary classic of dystopian literature may be disappointed. “The Testaments” is not nearly the devastating satire of political and theological misogyny that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is. In this new novel, Atwood is far more focused on creating a brisk thriller than she is on exploring the perversity of systemic repression.
But, of course, that’s not a fair complaint. Although the story of Gilead has long been called to the service of this or that contemporary cause, it remains entirely Atwood’s possession.
Gilead will never be the same.
Praise be. The national best-sellers lists were not available from Publishers Weekly by press time due to technical issues at data vendor NPD BookScan.