The Wall Street Journal - 07.09.2019 - 08.09.2019

C8| Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**

BOOKS

‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.’—JOSEPH STALIN

“The Testaments” grows from this
fertile mixture of politics and pop
culture. The story is set about 15 years
after the conclusion of the previous
novel, and it braids together the nar-
rations of three women who play a
collective role in undermining the
foundations of Gilead. The first is Aunt
Lydia, one of the most celebrated
“Founders” of the Republic and the
acknowledged head of operations
for the distaff world. “I control the
women’s side of [the regime’s] enter-
prise with an iron fist in a leather
glove in a woolen mitten,” she writes
in the clandestine journal she’s begun
to keep for the benefit of posterity.
Aunt Lydia is like a cross between a
Nazi kapo, doing the brutal bidding
of the ruling patriarchy, and a CIA
director, silently amassing power by
learning everybody’s secrets. Though
she has been fully complicit in Gilead’s
crimes, she is also playing a long game
of revenge against the men who made
her into a monster, and she intends to
“go out with a far bigger bang” than
a quiet and obedient death.
The other chapters come from the
testimonies of two teenage girls. One is
a Canadian named Daisy, whose parents
are involved with Mayday, the resistance
group devoted to smuggling women and
children out of Gilead and into Canada
on the “Underground Femaleroad.” The
second is Agnes, a girl raised in one of
Gilead’s wealthiest households and who,
like Daisy, comes to be linked with Aunt
Lydia’s conspiracy.
Which leads me to a question: Does
the name Agnes mean anything to you?
How you answer depends on whether
you have watched the TV adaptation of
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” because it’s
there, and not in the book, that Agnes
is introduced as a named character.
From the first pages of “The Testa-
ments” a division is established among

ContinuedfrompageC7

ory. There is a particular aptness to the

class titles: the Commanders, who

wage distant wars and seem largely

aloof from daily life; the Aunts, who

police the womenfolk in their brutal,

maternal fashion; the Marthas, who

cook and clean and gossip; and most

unnerving of all, the child-bearing

Handmaids, who are renamed to reflect

their status as the property of the men

they serve. The novel “The Handmaid’s

Tale” is ambiguous and inconclusive.

(Offred’s fate, for instance, is left un-

certain.) It sets out its richly allusive

elements without attempting to resolve

them. It works through implication,

and its triumph is principally a triumph

of language.

“The Testaments,” in contrast, is a

work of explanation. Ms. Atwood has

said that she was inspired to write it

by the questions people have bom-

barded her about the fate of Gilead and

its characters, and she has devised a

story that ties up the loose ends left

by both the book and the TV drama

(though she has shrewdly given herself

an opening for a further installment,

as well).

Ultimately, the difference between

the two novels can be boiled down to

the difference between “What does this

mean?” and “What happens?,” which is

also a way of describing the difference

between literature and entertainment.

Screen adaptations have always been

treated warily (if not contemptuously)

by writers because they have a way of

diminishing the possibilities of inter-

pretation. They spell out what is meant

to be abstract. In fact, every book is

“adapted” countless times, in the imag-

inations of its readers, and the best

books are those that give our imagina-

tions the freest rein to play.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” did that by

conjuring a world just aslant from our

own, partly historical, partly futuristic,

partly foreign, partly recognizable,

partly horrifying, partly sympathetic,

fierce in its convictions but sufficiently

open-ended to allow different readings

and conclusions. It’s a novel for all

readers. With “The Testaments,” Ms.

Atwood has written one for the fans.

Mr. Sacks reviews fiction for

The Wall Street Journal.

Margaret

Atwood’s

‘Testaments’

FIVE BESTBOOKS ON STALIN’S GREAT TERROR

The Diary of a
Gulag Prison Guard
By Ivan Chistyakov (2016)

1

The diary of Ivan Chistyakov, a
senior guard at the Baikal-Amur
Corrective Labor Camp in
eastern Russia, delivers a rare
insight into the mind of a Stalin-era
rank-and-file secret policeman—a
man caught in a world not so much of
evil as of senseless stupidity. His diary
covers the period 1935-36 and fills
two neatly written exercise books,
donated to the Memorial historical
organization by a relative and later
published. Its crushingly bleak
portrait of casual violence, escape
attempts and unfulfillable quotas all
play out in the deadly dark and cold
of a Siberian winter. “Minus 45
degrees. The trains run slowly,” writes
Chistyakov on Dec. 10, 1935. “Only
the moon, with a superior air, glides
serenely through the sky...thestove
warms you on one side while you
freeze on the other.” Chistyakov,
an educated man, feels powerless
to control not only his drunken
subordinates but also the exasper-
atingly violent and lazy (in his esti-
mation) convicts. “I’m beginning to
have that mark on my face, the stamp
of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of
moronic expression,” he writes. “My
heart is so desolate, it alarms me.”
Chistyakov may be standing in the
freezing wind on the outside of the
wire, but he is almost as much a pris-
oner as the prisoners he’s guarding.

The Gulag Archipelago
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973)

2

How is it possible to put two
strangers in a room—one an
executioner, the other a
prisoner—and not only
persuade one to kill the other but
convince both that this murder serves
some higher purpose? During his
eight years in the Gulag, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn felt the full brunt of
Stalin’s police state “on his own hide,”
in the Russian phrase. His epic “Gulag
Archipelago,” a “literary investiga-

Owen Matthews

His latest book, ‘An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent,’ will be published in December

WITNESS Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Vladivostok in 1994.

REUTERS

The Whisperers

By Orlando Figes (2007)

5

On a December night in 1937,

my grandmother Marfa

Bibikova was arrested as

the wife of an enemy of the

people. My mother, then not yet 4,

remembers the policemen’s leather

boots, the screaming, the sight of her

elder sister breaking free from the

grip of her captor to run after the

retreating police van that bore her

mother to the Gulag. “The Whisperers,”

by Orlando Figes, is full of similar

heart-wrenching stories, mostly

drawn from interviews and letters,

as well as from the archives. Mr. Figes

gives a human face and voice to the

tide of suffering. One is Zinaida

Bushueva, who, like my grandmother,

was separated from her children for

more than a decade. She returned a

broken woman. “She would never

show affection, she would never

stroke our hair or hold us close,”

recalls Bushueva’s daughter. “She

gave us nothing spiritually or

emotionally. The truth is, after the

camp, she had nothing to give.”

its readers. If you’ve seen the show you

know that Agnes is the daughter who

was stolen from Offred during the

Gilead takeover and then given to one

of the ruling families. If you haven’t,

she is simply a young woman with a

mysterious background.

This gap in understanding figures in

every aspect of the plot. Daisy’s fate is

tied up with that of Baby Nicole, who,

in season 3 of the series, is secreted

into Canada, sparking an international

incident between the countries. And

while many details sync with the TV

show’s unfolding storyline, others ap-

pear to purposely diverge from what

devoted viewers have been led to

expect. I’ll leave the exegeses to the

Wiki fan pages and Reddit discussion

boards. Suffice it to say that certain

nuances of “The Testaments” will be

missed by those who have merely read

“The Handmaid’s Tale.” All sequels pre-

suppose a certain degree of background

knowledge, but this is the first time

you need a subscription to Hulu.

And that, I think, is a noteworthy

development. Ms. Atwood is listed as a

consulting producer for the TV show,

so perhaps it will emerge that she has

also had a chair in the writers’ room.

Whatever the situation, I can’t think of

another case in which an author has

formally legitimized a production com-

pany’s changes to her fictional world.

(The HBO series “Game of Thrones”

was famously forced to advance beyond

the published material, but presumably

George R.R. Martin, should he ever

complete his book series, will override

the show’s deviations.) We are here

dealing with something categorically

different from a literary sequel. More

accurately, “The Testaments” is a new

installment in a multimedia franchise.

But it’s also that most humble thing:

a book. What if you were to read it

without boning up on episode recaps?

You’d find an engaging if largely insub-

stantial page turner. The unsettling

political questions evoked by the pre-

vious novel are only glossed here, as

Ms. Atwood concentrates on the stage-

craft of the espionage plot. Brisk,

amusing scenes depict Aunt Lydia’s

machinations against her fellow Aunts

and Gilead’s ruler, the blundering, wife-

murdering Commander Judd. Daisy

and Agnes are gradually recruited into

her scheme and work as moles in

Gilead’s backrooms before attempting a

high-wire escape to Canada with a

cache of damaging documents.

The most disappointing effect of

this streamlining is the way it flattens

the writing. The girls’ testimonies have

been scaled back to strictly functional

accounts of events (“I will now describe

the preparations leading up to my

proposed marriage,” and so on), and

while Aunt Lydia’s chapters are tex-

tured by remorse and anger, she has

the frustrating habit of expressing

everything in clichés. “You don’t be-

lieve the sky is falling until a chunk

of it falls on you,” she says, recalling

the rise of Gileadean fascism.

Yet there are memorable passages,

particularly in the chapters about

Agnes’s upbringing, when the spinning

of the plot’s gears is put on hold and

Ms. Atwood returns to exploring the

inner workings of her fictional micro-

cosm. This is the uncanny, paradoxical

world organized around rumor, fright-

ening innuendo and hermetic sacred

rituals, in which women are the main

day-to-day enforcers of their own

oppression. It’s a place where girls are

at once fanatically protected and sub-

jected to the most shocking abuses, and

where motherly love is allowed full

expression but also co-opted as a

weapon of the state. “The reality is that

many children were loved and cher-

ished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many

adults were kind though fallible, in

Gilead as elsewhere,” Agnes observes

at the start of her testimony, and it is

in the subtle warping and twisting

of values we share as our own that

“The Testaments” is at its best.

These moments are reminders of

the eerie potency of Ms. Atwood’s orig-

inal creation. The dystopia in the novel

“The Handmaid’s Tale” was forged

from a striking variety of sources. One

was America’s Puritan past, as aspects

of Gilead closely resemble the clerical

state of “The Scarlet Letter.” (Cleverly

and provocatively, the fundamentalist

government situates itself in the halls

of Harvard University.) Another influ-

ence was the all-seeing Communist

Party of the Soviet Union, alluded to by

the massive, looming wall bedecked

with the hanged bodies of heretics. But

this is also a modernized place of per-

verse corporate euphemisms. Citizens

worship together at Prayvaganzas. The

word “particicution” makes the savage

executions meted out by frothing

Handmaids sound almost like a team-

building exercise.

As in Orwell’s Oceania, terminology

is crucial to Gilead’s hold on the mem-

OBEY From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel,’ adapted by Renée Nault (Nan A. Talese, 240 pages, $22.95).

NAN A. TALESE

tion” of the history of Stalin’s terror,

is the most thoroughly researched,

deeply felt work ever written on the

subject. Yet in all its exhausting and

exhaustive detail, from the exact

dimensions of the tiny, blacked-out

holding cages to the horrors of being

transported across the 10 time zones

of the U.S.S.R. to frozen hellholes in

the Arctic, the central question

remains: “Where did this wolf-tribe

appear from among our own people?”

Solzhenitsyn asks of the hundreds of

thousands of ordinary, decent Soviet

men and women who were ready to

justify and even participate in the

massacre of their fellows. “Does it

really stem from our own roots? Our

own blood? It is ours.” Solzhenitsyn’s

explanation is that “the line dividing

good from evil cuts through the heart

of every human being. And who is

willing to destroy a piece of their own

heart?” That has the ring of truth.

Still it does not explain, as perhaps

nothing can, the enormity of the

mass delusion that was Stalinism—

one that claimed up to 15 million lives

through execution, man-made famine

and forced labor.

Faithful Ruslan

By Georgi Vladimov (1976)

3

Russians look to their writers

not only to think but to live

more deeply than ordinary

mortals. The greatest among

them—martyrs of Stalinism

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Varlam

Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn

—are well known. But a younger, less-

famous generation of Soviet writers

also faced persecution and exile for

revealing the horrors of the Gulag.

In Georgi Vladimov’s novel “Faithful

Ruslan,” the hero is a fanatically

faithful guard dog who is turned free

by his master, a prison guard. Rooted

in the false hope of Khrushchev’s

thaw, the story is a brilliant allegory

of the confusions that come with

sudden liberty. “With his steaming

tongue lolling to one side, blinking

guiltily, twitching his ears,” Vladimov

writes, “Ruslan honestly admitted

that he was helpless” to refuse his

unwanted liberation. Chillingly,

Ruslan—like so many other faithful

believers—yearns for old certainties

and devotion to the cause. Even at the

hour of his death, he remains utterly

steadfast in a code of absolute loyalty

to the masters who know best.

The Great Terror

By Robert Conquest (1968)

4

It’s hard to overestimate

the impact that Robert

Conquest’s extraordinary

study had on the West’s

perceptions of Soviet history. Using

rare Soviet materials, some published

during the Khrushchev thaw, others

in self-published samizdat format,

the British historian put together an

authoritative chronicle of Stalin’s

murderous reign. Western communists

and fellow travelers dismissed the

book as propaganda. But when Soviet

archives were partially opened in

1991, Conquest’s estimates of 700,000

“legal” executions during 1937-38—

and of the total number of other

deaths thanks to the Soviet terror

campaigns (“hardly lower than some

fifteen million”)—were proven

chillingly

accurate.