Thirty four years after The Handmaid’s Tale and a hit TV show later, Margaret Atwood’s intriguing sequel, The Testaments, highlights the power of narrative

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“WHO would have thought that Gilead Studies – neglected for so many decades – would suddenly have gained so greatly in popularity?” muses a fictional future historian in The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

It’s a tongue-in-cheek reflection of reality: some 34 years since The Handmaid’s Tale was published, the dystopian novel has had an unforeseen resurgence following a hit TV series, inspiring global protests about reproductive rights.

In the Republic of Gilead, a puritanical, theocratic society that has replaced the US, fertility rates are in free fall, after chemical and radiation exposure due to environmental damage. Birth defects and stillbirths (“Unbabies”) are common, and childhood cancer is rising.


To redress this, the eponymous Handmaids are farmed out to powerful men whose wives can’t have children, for the purposes of procreating. (Officially, male infertility doesn’t exist.) Abortion is outlawed, and doctors who have carried out the procedure are executed.

Set 15 years later, The Testaments introduces a generation of girls who have grown up within Gilead, including one of the book’s three narrators, Agnes Jemima. They are taught they are “precious flowers” in a society where their worth is based on chastity and the ability to reproduce. Contrast this with a Canadian girl of the same generation, Daisy, for whom the piousness of Gilead is “weird as fuck”, the republic “a terrible, terrible place, where women couldn’t have jobs or drive cars”.

Aunt Lydia, one of Gilead’s female architects, returns as an unlikely subversive force, meting out a twisted form of retributive justice. She justifies her complicity in the regime as self-preservation – the rationalisation is reminiscent of Nazis invoking the plea of superior orders. “Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurled at you. Or better for your chances of staying alive,” Aunt Lydia reasons. (Atwood read the “very cheery” diary of Joseph Goebbels in writing the book, she said at a press conference today.) The nexus of these experiences drives the plot, which is both taut and gratifying, if tidy.

The extreme incarnations of the oppressive society Atwood created seemed divorced from the liberal democracies of 1985 when The Handmaid’s Tale was published. But for Gilead’s antecedents, look elsewhere: combine Romania’s outlawing of birth control under Nicolae Ceauşescu with the monolithic theocracy of Iran, while Guardians escorting Gilead’s women remind us of Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship laws.

In troubled political times, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurry. Since the election of Donald Trump – an impetus for renewed interest in the book – some US states have passed laws restricting the right to abortion. Meanwhile, fertility is dropping: in the past four decades, sperm counts in developed countries have fallen by more than half. And in July, the US Environmental Protection Agency said it wouldn’t ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that has been linked to nervous system damage in young children.

Read more: Margaret Atwood on life after man

Like its predecessor, The Testaments also draws on current events. School-sanctioned marches in Canada call to mind climate strikes, as young protesters hold signs reading: “GILEAD, CLIMATE SCIENCE DE-LIAR! GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!”

Atwood also wryly inverts the dynamics of US immigration politics. Gileadean refugees cross the Canadian border, smuggled via the Underground Femaleroad. They become the refugees that Italy, Germany and even New Zealand are unwilling to accept.

At the heart of the novel is the power of narrative itself – of who gets to speak and to listen, of the ability of information to limit, control or expand a world. “Knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge,” writes Aunt Lydia. “Loose lips sink ships,” several characters repeat. “Least said, soonest mended,” is another recurring adage.

A regime’s official story, argues The Testaments, rarely aligns with reality. Autocracies can be built on controlled narratives, but in the end, truth can still destroy.