Praise be for this sequel

Margaret Atwood has published follow-up to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Almost 35 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” shocked the world, Margaret Atwood has finally given birth to “The Testaments.”

This isn’t just the most anticipated novel of the year; it’s one of the most anticipated sequels of the modern age — like Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” flying in on Harry Potter’s broom. Last fall, the Annunciation of “The Testaments” was heralded around the world. In August, blessed reviewers received preview copies printed with a false title and author, lest the book’s revelations slip preemptively into the wrong hands. A week before the novel was published, it was already shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And Tuesday, Atwood’s soldout, publication-day appearance at the National Theatre in London was to be live broadcast to 1,300 cinemas from Canada to Malta.

Blessed be the fruit! A confluence of political and cultural forces has made “The Testaments” as vital as a baby in Gilead. First, the election of President Donald Trump cattle-prodded “The Handmaid’s Tale” back up the bestseller list. Then Hulu’s adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss inspired millions more to care about the plight of the fertile few. And now that our reproductive freedom hangs on the frail health of a single 86-year-old Supreme Court justice, red-cloaked Handmaids have swarmed capitols across the country. Consequently, the terrain of Gilead is probably more familiar to Americans than the geography of the United States.

Fans of Atwood’s dystopian classic will remember that Offred, the narrator of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” concluded her secret testimony by acknowledging, “Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing.”

Now we know. “The Testaments” opens in Gilead about 15 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but it’s an entirely different novel in form and tone. Inevitably, the details are less shocking — at least in part because the horrors of Gilead’s male-centered theocracy are already so well known.

Atwood responds to the challenge of that familiarity by giving us the narrator we least expect: Aunt Lydia. It’s a brilliant strategic move that turns the world of Gilead inside out. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Aunt Lydia is the orthodox teacher whose platitudes and instructions cycle through Offred’s mind. But in “The Testaments,” Aunt Lydia speaks directly to us in all her conflicted complexity. She has become the supreme matriarch of this masculine cult. As a living legend, the very model of moral perfection and feminine wisdom, she enjoys a special position of extraordinary power — and she knows just how precarious that is.

“Only dead people are allowed to have statues,”

she begins, “but I have been given one while still 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.

ARTHUR MOLA/INVISION In “The Testaments,” her highly anticipated sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood has a surprising narrator.