![]() ![]() Indeed, she is happy to destroy women who have internalised the values of the patriarchal regime: one girl, Shunammite, is coldly sacrificed to her own silliness, a move that Lydia seems to enjoy. Lydia, however, collaborates as an equal, not as a victim she is not in thrall. The first book was good on the envy between women, when they have no power The Testaments looks at collaboration – another vice of the oppressed. Tortured, imprisoned and tested, she is given a choice, and she chooses “the path most travelled by”, one of compromise, betrayal and lies. Her induction into the order of Aunts is described with a chilling vigour. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of recent years reveal the same themes Their first sighting of a mass execution does not dull their appetite for food, in fact it does the opposite: afterwards, Lydia is given an egg sandwich and, “I am ashamed to say, I gobbled it up with relish”. A crowd of imprisoned women is described as “crocodiles”, ready to “leap, thrash about and snap”. “Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader.” She appeals to the heartless survivor in all of us – at least this is what she seems to say, that when the chips are down, we will revert to our most primitive state. ![]() In Lydia’s world view, people rise and fall by strength or weakness, and justice is a kind of theatre. The story is driven and described by the infamous Aunt Lydia, and she is just as terrifying, in her astringency, as you would expect her to be. The most compelling portrait is that of wickedness – of course it is. There are three narrators, two of them young and idealistic, one of them old and endlessly cunning. The novel picks up 15 or 16 years after Offred disappears to an unknown fate at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. She is interested not in how people become degraded, as objects (that is so easily done), but how they became morally compromised. In The Testaments, Atwood reclaims the right to consider such difficulties rather than simply imagine them. It was sometimes hard to look, or to look away. The series became a kind of visual enlargement of the agonies of the age, or the female agonies at least. ![]() Atwood certainly has had an enormous amount to think about since her novel went supernova, not just as the hugely successful television adaptation, but as a powerful symbol of resistance to the misogyny of Donald Trump and the Christian rightwing. ![]()
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