If “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a warning, “The Testaments” has a more positive message
in a line outside the Capitol while senators considered a health-care bill that would restrict family-planning services. They reappeared in Washington to watch over the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, a controversial Supreme Court justice. In Ohio’s statehouse they sat, heads bowed, as lawmakers discussed banning a common abortion procedure. Each time the protest was silent. Their long crimson gowns and winged white headdresses made the point.
The contemporary influence of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is approaching that of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Over 8m copies have been sold in English. In 2017 it was the most-read novel in America, according to Amazon. Ms Atwood quips that she “may be the only person on the planet who is such a beneficiary” of America’s rancour. More than three decades after the original, a sequel to the book, “The Testaments”, was published this week.
When Ms Atwood was writing that book in 1984, she wanted to imbue it with an uncanny realism, and sought biblical or historical precedents for every detail and policy in Gilead, amassing a box of newspaper clippings. The past is “filled with echoes”, she wrote in “The Handmaid’s Tale”. She had a point. The religious conservatism that was then sweeping America harked back to the country’s Puritan history. Communist regimes relied on primitive propaganda.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” described the new regime’s brutality from Offred’s perspective only, showing how a politician’s promise of a better future “never means better for everyone…it always means worse, for some”. The scope of “The Testaments” is wider. It uncovers Gilead’s inner workings: the ideological hypocrisies, the fragile alliances, the institutional rot. It highlights, through Aunt Lydia, the coercive tactics employed by repressive states.
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