The Testaments

I recently finished reading ‘The Testaments’, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set 15 years later after Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale makes her perilous attempt at escape from Gilead to Canada.

Offred has little to say in this book – two or three lines at most. Instead, the tale is left to three narrators: Agnes who grew up in Gilead as the daughter of an important commander, Daisy, an anti-Gilead activist teenager living in Canada and Aunt Lydia who was an important character in the earlier work and who has a lot more to say here.

Gilead, formerly most of the United States, is still a dystopian, highly misogynistic society that it was in the earlier work and we learn a lot more about how it was founded (and it reminds me scarily of some recent events).

Lydia is the leader of the ‘aunts’ – the gender norm enforcers who preside over the lives of the handmaids and train the wives. But Lydia, underneath her outspoken strong support for Gilead is really collecting information on its corruption and deceit with the aim of eventually bringing it down. We learn that, before the creation of Gilead, she was a judge and used some deft political maneuvering to avoid the fate of most other educated women of the time – execution.

The Testaments is more plot-driven than The Handmaid’s Tale and Atwood is very good at releasing little bits of information that move the plot forward and reveal the relationship between the various characters.

I like it a lot and, if you like any of Atwood’s earlier works, you will too. It’s available on the Maryland Digital Library. Give it a try!!