The political deployment of imagery from Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” began in Texas, in the spring of 2017, at a protest against the state’s ongoing campaign to restrict abortion rights. The TV adaptation of the book would soon begin streaming, on Hulu. The show stars Elisabeth Moss as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Offred, a woman stripped of her job, her family, and her name in a near-future American theocracy called Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, forced to live as a breeding concubine; each month, she is ceremonially raped by her Commander, a man of high status, in the interest of rebuilding a population that has dwindled owing to secular immorality, environmental toxicity, and super-S.T.D.s. Like all Handmaids, she wears a scarlet dress, a long cloak, and a face-obscuring white bonnet, a uniform that Atwood based, in part, on the woman on the label of Old Dutch Cleanser, an image that had scared her as a child.

Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood’s dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness. The current President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and the Vice-President is a man who, as governor of Indiana, signed a law that required fetal remains of miscarriages and abortions, at any stage of pregnancy, to be cremated or buried. This year, half a dozen states have passed legislation banning abortion after around six weeks; Alabama passed a law that would ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, including cases involving rape or incest. (All these laws have yet to take effect.)

At first, I found it moving to see women at protests in Handmaid garb. Sometimes they carried signs with the dog-Latin phrase “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” which, in Atwood’s novel, is scribbled in Offred’s closet, a message from a previous Handmaid: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. The costumes could be read as an expression of inter-class solidarity: women with the time and the resources to protest tend not to be those who suffer first when reproductive rights are restricted, but the former were saying, on behalf of the latter, that they would fight for us all.

Only a portion of the women in Gilead are Handmaids; others are Marthas, who cook and clean, or Aunts, who indoctrinate other women into the life style of subjugation, or Wives, obedient trophies who smile graciously while other women do all the work. But the novel confines you within Offred’s perspective—it suggests, even demands, identification with the Handmaids. The TV show, with its lush cinematography and its sumptuous art direction and its decision to have Moss say things like “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches,” turned this suggestion, perhaps inevitably, into a marketing angle: we are all Handmaids. It has reinvented the subdued Offred of the novel as the destructive, mesmerizing, apparently unbreakable June. (That’s the name Offred had before Gilead—though, in Atwood’s original conception, Offred’s real name had disappeared.)

As the show became popular, and the iconography spread, its meaning became diffuse. The Handmaid seemed to evolve from a symbol of advocacy for victims into a way of playacting victimhood. Women were buying red cloaks and white bonnets on Amazon, leaving four- and five-star reviews with tongue-in-cheek Gilead greetings. “Blessed be the fruit,” one customer wrote, noting that she “got lots of compliments.” Another review: “Perfect. Can’t wait for Halloween!” M-G-M, which produces the TV adaptation, briefly attempted to sell a line of Handmaid-themed wine. The twenty-two-year-old billionaire cosmetics entrepreneur Kylie Jenner threw a “Handmaid’s Tale”-themed party for her best friend’s birthday. An instinct toward solidarity had been twisted into what seemed like a private fantasy of persecution that could flatten all differences among women—a vision of terrible equality, which, in an era when minute gradations of power are analyzed constantly, could induce a secret thrill.

Sometimes I found myself wondering how many of the women indulging this fantasy would, in some future real-life Gilead, become not Handmaids but Wives. This was, it turns out, not only a judgmental thought but a simplistic one. Atwood has now written a sequel, “The Testaments” (Nan A. Talese), set fifteen years after the first book ends. The new novel, like its predecessor, is presented as a story assembled from historical artifacts, with an epilogue that depicts a twenty-second-century academic conference about Gilead. But, in “The Testaments,” Handmaids and Wives hardly enter the picture at all. Instead, it is about the Aunts, and three of them in particular: one whom we already know from the first book, and who, we learn, helped to establish Gilead’s shadow matriarchy, within a thicket of rapists; one who was raised inside Gilead, and who grew up devout and illiterate and expecting to be married by the age of fourteen; and one who is sent to Gilead, as a teen-ager, by the resistance, which is based in Canada, and which carries out reconnaissance missions and helps citizens of Gilead to escape.

The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. She has said that “The Testaments” was inspired by readers’ questions about the inner workings of Gilead, and also by “the world we’ve been living in.” But it seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become.

Atwood, who was born in Ottawa in 1939, has been the most famous Canadian author for decades. She published her first book, a collection of poems, in 1961, and has since written, among other things, seventeen novels, sixteen poetry collections, ten works of nonfiction, eight short-story collections, and seven children’s books. As a novelist, she has a wide tonal range, moving from sarcasm to solemnity, austerity to playfulness; she can toggle between extremes of subtlety and unsubtlety from book to book. In her “MaddAddam” trilogy, begun in the early two-thousands and set in a near-future world where overpopulation leads society to reduce everything to its base functionality, Atwood takes aim at technocracy and corporate control: people eat “ChickieNobs,” the product of genetically engineered chickens that consist of a mouth surrounded by twenty breast-meat tubes; the Crakers, a humanoid race designed for a minimum of trouble and a maximum of efficiency, have giant penises that turn blue when the females of the species are in heat. “Cat’s Eye,” on the other hand, which was published in 1988, is a quiet study of the ways that women and girls are gently and devastatingly cruel to one another. I reread it recently, and felt a sensation I associate with reading Atwood: nothing was really happening, but I was riveted, and fearful, as if someone were showing me footage of a car crash one frame at a time.

Atwood’s best novels bring to bear a psychologist’s grasp of deep, interior forces and a mad scientist’s knack for conceptual experiments that can draw these forces out into the open. “The Blind Assassin,” published in 2000, does this: a novel about two sisters growing up in rural Ontario, it contains a novel-within-the-novel, which itself contains another novel, a science-fiction story set on a planet called Zycron. So does “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which had become required reading by the time I bought it for an English class in college. I was acquainted with theocracy, and the sick appeal of female subservience: I had grown up Baptist in Texas, with the idea that girls should consecrate their bodies for God and for their future husbands. At the religious school that I attended for twelve years, we regularly stood and pledged allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag (white, with a red cross on a blue canton), and the Bible. In this context, Gilead seemed a little effortful: you didn’t need to rename the butcher shop All Flesh and rebrand rape as a supervised monthly ceremony in order to bend a society to someone’s bad idea of God’s will. But, such broad strokes aside, the novel is characterized by remarkable patience and restraint. Coming across the book’s offhand mention that oranges have been scarce “since Central America was lost to the Libertheos,” you can spend twenty pages wondering about Gilead’s import-export structure—and, all the while, the existential diminishment of the utterly ordinary Offred is quietly lighting you on fire.