This – together with the constant “seepage” of handmaids being helped to freedom by the so-called Underground Femaleroad – has not been good for Gilead, which has settled into an inevitable “dog-eat-dog maturity”. The “child” of Commander Waterford and his wife (though in fact, as we all know, born of Offred/June and fathered by her lover, Nick), Nicole was smuggled into Canada as a baby and has not been seen since.
Perhaps wisely, Atwood neatly leapfrogs the TV series – presumably leaving it open for several more seasons – while plucking just one significant detail from it: Baby Nicole. This novel opens 15 years after the end of the last book.
If ever a novelist could justify the spawning of a sequel, Atwood can. Given all of this history – and the fact that for 35 years fans have apparently been begging for answers to a host of Gilead-related questions – it’s not surprising that The Testaments feels as eagerly awaited as a handmaid’s bouncing baby. Who, after all, is Donald Trump if not Commander Waterford without the charm? And I can’t be the only one who, watching the Trump crowd’s chants of “Lock her up!” or “Send her back!”, found herself thinking of taser-wielding Aunt Lydia and the handmaids’ cries of “Her fault!” when one of their number “confesses” to having been gang-raped? With the implacable rise of the Christian right in the US, never has it felt more urgent for women to guard both their bodies and their reproductive systems against (some) men and the state. Still, no one could have guessed the extent to which recent history (as well as a superb TV offshoot) would bring it eerily, terrifyingly back into focus.
The newly born Republic of Gilead, with its abuses and abominations, its hideously misogynistic vocabulary and gruesomely rationalised constraints, was just about far enough from our own world to seem beguiling, but also close enough to feel like a wake-up call. T hose of us lucky enough to read The Handmaid’s Tale back when it first appeared in 1985 will remember the shock of a novel that felt both claustrophobically precise and shatteringly prescient.
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