Entertainment Weekly - 10.2019

The Must List

→ Thirty-four

years after her

startlingly pre-

scient novel The

Handmaid’s Tale,

Margaret Atwood

delivers a potent

sequel sure to

supercharge politi-

cal debate. Arriv-

ing in the prime

Trump era, The

Testaments reads

like feminist wish

fulfillment as the

woman-hating,

fundamentalist

country of Gilead

heads for a much-

deserved fall,

orchestrated from

deep within its

cloistered center

of power. It’s a rev-

olution many in

real life hope for—

and that’s exactly

what the 79-year-

old Booker Prize

winner intends.

whatever paradise or utopia

was promised. New generations

come along and they are not

the fervent true believers that

the people who set it up may

have been. You’ve seen this

enacted before your very eyes.

The Handmaid’s Tale predated

the Trump administration, but

it’s hard not to draw parallels

to American politics.

You know, Madeleine Albright

has just come out with a book

called Fascism: A Warning.

One of the questions left open

by The Handmaid’s Tale is how

Gilead ends. You answer that in

The Testaments—what was the

real-life inspiration?

Regimes end either because

they’re undermined from within

or because they run out of

steam. They fail to deliver on

And you can go into that book

and read about all different

kinds of fascism—there’s lots

of models, big and small, but

one thing these totalitarian

regimes have in common

is they all want to roll back

women’s rights. There are no

exceptions to that.

How does this sequel fit into

the universe of the pending

fourth season of Hulu’s TV

series of Handmaid’s?

What I have given them, in the

locked writers’ room that

nobody’s allowed into—includ-

ing me—is a whole new

whiteboard and a bunch of new

characters. The story of the

characters in the show at the

moment is left open, so it’s up

to [showrunner] Bruce [Miller]

and the highly competent writ-

ing team as to how they get

those people into position.

You leave a few things open to

speculation in the conclusion

of The Testaments. What

theories do you think readers

will have?

I never try to second-guess

readers, and I think it’s mean

for the author to fill everything

in. Why should I be the abso-

lutely infallible authority on

anything? The other thing

about a book is, it’s got these

things called covers. And if you

don’t like the book, you can

close them. Nobody’s making

you read this, except for peo-

ple with jobs like yours.

—Seija Rankin

TESTAMENTS

BOOKS

By Margaret Atwood

T

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12 OCTOBER 2019 EW ● COM

JEAN MALEK