30 | New Scientist | 21 September 2019
Book
The Testaments
Margaret Atwood
Chatto & Windus“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,Waking up to anti-science
In The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale,
resistance is growing to the grim, puritanical world of Gilead, finds Donna LuViews Culture
ISOLDE OHLBAUM/LAIF/CAMERA PRESSHULUElisabeth Moss and
Alexis Bledel star in
the TV adaptation of
The Handmaid’s Taleterrible place, where women
couldn’t have jobs or drive cars”.
Spoiler alert: Aunt Lydia, one of
Gilead’s female architects, returns
in a new guise. “Better to hurl
rocks than to have them hurled at
you. Or better for your chances of
staying alive,” she reasons. Atwood
read the “very cheery” diary of
Hitler’s minister of propaganda,
Joseph Goebbels, while writing the
book. The nexus of all this 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“ As seems characteristic
of troubled political
times, the line between
fact and fiction is blurry”