The Testaments --
Margaret Atwood's long awaited sequel
Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (34 years ago) answers the questions of what happened to Offred/June and how Gilead falls. The Hulu series’s first season was based on the earlier book, but with its success, seasons 2 and 3 extrapolated out. Atwood’s sequel leaps ahead of the show, fifteen years after the first book ends, focusing on three characters: June’s two daughters and Aunt Lydia. As with the first book, what’s happening for the reader is distant past in the world of the novel. The alternating narratives of the three characters turn out to be documents found many years after the fact and are, at the end, puzzled over by researchers and historians.
I love the series and I feel like it was an easy leap into the book, but if you haven’t watched it, it would make sense to re-read Handmaid, to better re-situate yourself in the world of Gilead. As with the show, June has smuggled her child, Nicole, out of Gilead and into Canada; in the television version, June stays behind, committed to getting other children born of handmaids out and she is determined to reunite with her older child, Hannah. In The Testaments, we find that the older daughter, named Agnes Jemima in the book, has grown up in the home of a commander and his wife, cognizant of the fact that she was not their blood child. When her adoptive mother dies, the commander takes a new wife who fits the stereotype of the evil stepmother, anxious to marry off the young woman and get her out of her home. Agnes, repelled by the older man they want her to marry, manages to get herself accepted into the Aunts, a group of women closely resembling nuns but with a cruel streak; they train handmaids and reinforce the strict roles of women in Gilead.
Nicole, raised in Canada by adoptive parents, is unaware that she is the poster child of both Gilead and Canada, a symbol of all those who got away or were stolen, depending on your perspective. When her parents are killed in a bombing by Gilead operatives, she is persuaded by an underground group to go into Gilead and meet with someone only referred to as “the source,” who has been sending them information about the corruption in Gilead. It’s not really giving anything away to say that Aunt Lydia, the Queen Bee of the Aunts, is the source. A former judge, Lydia is wily and knows politics. In the vein of "if you can’t beat them, join them", she’s created a powerful and influential role for herself in order to survive and thrive, but she’s always harbored a resentment against the men who do not see her as an equal and ultimately expect her to do their bidding. Privvy to much of the inside scoop in the world of the commanders, she’s keeping careful records.
Can Aunt Lydia be trusted by the Canadians to aid them in bringing down Gilead? The Ann Dowd t.v. character was so much in my head as I read, that I had trouble thinking she would actually do the right thing. We know from the ending of the first book, that Gilead does fall; the how and the why are uncertain and what ultimately keeps the reader going. It was interesting to be reading this while the current headlines are all about the whistleblower who may possibly, finally bring down the corrupt administration of Donald Trump. Wouldn’t it be great if it was a woman?
