The Testaments

The Testaments ~ Margaret Atwood

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and takes place 15 years after the events of her first book. If you are unfamiliar with The Handmaid’s Tale, it is the story of a dystopian America, Gilead, taken over by a group of religious fundamentalists who subjugate women, largely because human fertility has greatly diminished. The nation is segmented into strict strata. At the top are the commanders and their wives. If the wife is unable to conceive (it is always assumed to be the wife’s fertility in question), they bring in a handmaid. Handmaids are women who have proven they are fertile (by having a baby), and they are forced to bear children to the commander and his wife. It is a horrible society, extremely violent and brutal, with layers and layers of totalitarian. The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of a woman who was captured while trying to escape to Canada. Her daughter is stolen from her and given to a Commander and his wife, and she is forced into becoming a handmaid. She eventually becomes pregnant, and it is suggested that she escapes at the end of the book.

The Testaments is told from the points of view of three characters, Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy. Aunt Lydia plays a large part in The Handmaid’s Tale, and is fairly high up in the hierarchy of women called Aunts, whose job it is to train and control the handmaids. The Aunts decide which handmaid will go to which commander, etc. In addition, they are in charge of the genealogy of marrying off the daughters of the commanders to other commanders. That’s a lot of backstory. Anyway, Atwood has been involved with the making of the 2 Hulu series based on these books, and there are some things that are the same and some that are very different. In The Handmaid’s Tale (the book), Offred’s daughter is not named, but in the TV series, she is June’s daughter Hannah, named Agnes by the people who adopt her after she is stolen from June. Also in the show, June’s second daughter, Nicole, is whisked away to Canada, where her name is changed to Daisy.

We’ve been watching The Testaments, and Maya has a great memory for books and remembers so many details. But me? Not so much. So I decided to listen to the audiobook to spark my memory. I know I read the book when it came out, but honestly, I remembered very little. So this was a great re-read for me. I especially loved Aunt Lydia’s story, which flashes back to the early days of Gilead to the ‘present’, and shows how she became and Aunt and what her motivations and story are.

Anyone who has read The Handmaid’s Tale knows that it starts out as discovered papers at an academic conference, many years after the fall of Gilead. So it’s not a real spoiler to say that Gilead will fall. What’s interesting in The Testaments is seeing how it happens and what the characters’ roles are. Highly recommended.