Margaret Atwood had a cameo in the television series based on her book The Handmaid's Tale. She played an Aunt in a scene where a woman is ritually shamed by a group of handmaids for being gang raped at age 14. Atwood found the scene 'horribly upsetting', though it was possibly not as wrenching to write as to enact or watch.
In the original book, a few deft sentences lead the reader to Offred's insight into her own complicity. 'I used to think well of myself,' she says. 'I didn't then.' The scene is moral, not sensational; it works through the brain, not the eyes. This is one reason Atwood's work feels so ageless and necessary.
In The Testaments, Atwood reclaims the right to consider such difficulties rather than simply imagine them. She is interested not in how people become degraded as objects, but how they become morally compromised. The novel picks up 15 or 16 years after Offred disappears. There are three narrators: two young and idealistic, one old and endlessly cunning. The most compelling portrait is that of wickedness, driven by the infamous Aunt Lydia.
Lydia's induction into the order of Aunts is described with chilling vigour. Tortured, imprisoned and tested, she chooses 'the path most travelled by' – compromise, betrayal and lies. The first book was good on envy between women when they have no power; The Testaments looks at collaboration, another vice of the oppressed. Lydia collaborates as an equal, not a victim, and is happy to destroy women who have internalised patriarchal values.
The younger women, Agnes and Daisy, have not lived a life of compromise. Daisy is bolshy and idealistic, Agnes loyal and ready to love. They are courageous and hopeful, venturing out like heroes of old. The dystopia of Gilead has worn well; computers exist but the internet is suppressed. Information is used as a liberating force, and authority is centralised and can be overthrown.
