That one seemed to be a Gilead true believer. Which means she is a different Lydia from Handmaid's one-dimensional villain. The Testaments' Lydia, however, is by turns stone cold, crafty, grandiose. Offred was a sort of cipher - a beaten-down victim of the new regime who, aside from a little spark of rebellion, seemed like she could be any handmaiden. She's the antithesis of Handmaid's Offred as a protagonist. This Gilead isn't - and can't possibly be - as fresh and mind-blowing as it was to readers in 1985, but the sheer novelty of this expanded view allows her world to continue to surprise us.Īh, Aunt Lydia.

And Aunt Lydia - yes, that Aunt Lydia - has near-godlike status as one of Gilead's founding Aunts and spends her days quietly collecting dirt on Commanders and fellow Aunts. Daisy is a Canadian girl repulsed by Gilead, raised by strangely overprotective parents. The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's follow-up to her classic novel The Handmaid's Tale, returns to that dystopic theocracy 15 years later via three protagonists: Agnes, a girl in Gilead who from a young age rejects marriage, though her parents intend to marry her to a powerful Commander. Mostly, they lurk just outside the frame, threatening to swoop in at any moment to wreak havoc.Īnd that absence only emphasizes that the women of Gilead are more fascinating than ever. Beyond that, they are chilly, dull, uninterested in the women around them - to the point that they also seem kind of dim.

We know that Gilead men are at best nonentities, at worst monstrous. We learn that another respected man is a pedophile who gropes young girls. We learn that a high-ranking government official serially kills off each of his teenage wives once they get too old for his tastes, then seeks out new targets. We hear of one who mostly shuts himself in his study, away from his family, to work all day. We learn very little about it in The Testaments. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Testaments Subtitle The Sequel to the Handmaid's Tale Author Margaret Eleanor Atwood

The handmaid's tale book 2