Book Talk: Atwood, The Testaments

Thirty-five years after Margaret Atwood’s blockbuster, The Handmaid’s Tale, was published, Ms. Atwood wrote the prequel/sequel, The Testaments (2019, 415 pages in softcover format). How can a book be both? The prequel is found in the secret notes and files of Aunt Lydia, a judge before a section of the United States became Gilead. She’s now the most powerful woman in the new dystopia.

In her memoirs, she writes: “I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities, and we would always defend them.” But after Gilead secedes from the United States and Aunt Lydia is arrested, she is interned in a sports stadium with other women prisoners. For an indeterminate period of time, they live in filth and fear, receiving barely enough foods scraps to keep them alive. They are a version on this side of the ocean of French Jews suffering every manner of humiliation and indignity while waiting to be herded to Nazi death camps.

The sequel parts of the book involve Agnes and Nicole, teenage girls who fall under the spell of Aunt Lydia, their instructor on the new morality. Combined, the three characters give us various views of what it’s like inside a misogynistic autocracy, draped in some perverted form of Christianity. In the Bible, which is cited very selectively, it states, “Go forth and multiply.” But in Gilead (as in the United States) birthrates have fallen dramatically. So young, fertile girls seem to be destined to be Handmaids, assigned to Commanders in order to bear their children.