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Atwood doesn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the horror-story aspects of Gilead, although there are some pretty grim scenes, and the major male character, Commander Judd, has a disturbing habit of taking a succession of very young wives, each of whom dies under questionable circumstances. It’s frankly not that difficult to guess how the arc of each major figure will play out, so that much of the satisfaction late in the novel derives from elements clicking into place in neat melodramatic fashion. It’s clear from the beginning that the central plot movement will show how these three stories become intertwined, and how collectively they contribute to the eventual fate of Gilead itself. One of the threads that all three narratives have in common is the issue of Baby Nicole, which has been a source of tension between Gilead and Canada ever since she was smuggled into Canada, possibly along the “Underground FemaleRoad,” a conceit which unsubtly draws a parallel between Canada here and the North during the American Civil War. The other two are “witness testimonies,” one from the point of view of Agnes, a privileged daughter of Gilead, being groomed to marry a Commander, and the other from the viewpoint of Daisy, being raised by parents who run a used clothing store in Toronto and who seem strangely overprotective.
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One is a handwritten manuscript from Aunt Lydia, the most notorious character held over from the earlier novel and the TV series (which, in an afterword, Atwood seems quite pleased with). The story unfolds in three first-person narratives, all described as documents found after the (now much more explicit) fall of Gilead. In The Testaments, she actually makes more sophisticated use of that technique, in ways that benefit her plotting. I always felt that, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood pulled a significant punch by employing the familiar technique of a “future past” framing, adding an epilogue which casts the whole novel as a tale found on cassette tapes sometime after the presumed fall of Gilead, reassuring us that the nightmare didn’t really last (as opposed to, say, Orwell, who pretty much left us with that face-stomping boot forever).
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Instead, she’s given us an account of how Gilead begins to unravel – a novel which is part Machiavellian court politics, part espionage adventure, part coming-of-age tale, and, as we would expect from Atwood, all immensely readable. Atwood might have chosen the same route, giving us a narrative that explained the preconditions that led to the founding of Gilead in the first place, but it’s possible that she figured the last three or four years would do just as well. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited in 1958, it wasn’t even a novel: he just ticked off the ways in which the world was rushing toward his earlier nightmare scenario. Revisiting a classic dystopia carries its own risks, like making a monster-movie sequel: you can never be quite as shocking as the first time out, especially when your world was as grim as Atwood’s. In The Testaments, set some 15 years after the first novel, the fearsome Aunts still have the occasional lunch at the Schlafly Café and spy on each other like Cold War-era Stasi, which lends a vaguely retro feel to this new version of the Republic of Gilead, even though it’s as oppressive as ever and still has a distressing taste for violent, summary executions.
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Well, almost 35 years later, we have a pretty good idea of how bad, so it wasn’t too surprising that the novel suddenly popped back on the bestseller lists in 2017, even before anyone had seen the TV series. It made sense to ask, as Atwood did, just how bad things could get. When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, the year after the real-life 1984 and at the height of the Thatcher/Reagan era, figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell were still ascendant, and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in the US was still a raw memory.