The Testaments builds on the best and worst parts of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Aux Features Book Review
Hulu bought the rights to adapt The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, before the book was released. It was an easy choice for the streaming service, which is working on the fourth season of its hugely successful series based on Atwood’s novel about a future where the U.S. has become Gilead, a nation run by religious extremists who have forced fertile women into sexual slavery as Handmaids. But The Testaments could provide Hulu not just with a future series but also a roadmap for how to improve its current one.
The Testaments is set 15 years after the events of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and follows three women connected to that book’s narrator, Offred. Agnes is the daughter she had before the rise of Gilead, who was stolen from her and adopted by the wife of one of the new nation’s Commanders. The teenage Daisy learns that she is actually Nicole, a child Offred conceived as a Handmaid and spirited away to safety in Canada. The most fascinating among the three narrators is Aunt Lydia, the cruel leader of the Handmaid program who serves as a primary villain in both the original book and the Hulu series.
The show’s writers have often focused on examining the way Gilead harms and traps not just the Handmaids but also those ostensibly in power, often attempting to elicit sympathy for rapists, torturers, murderers, and those who condone and are complicit in such crimes. While this has sometimes been met with criticism and disdain in the series, here Atwood pulls that trick off masterfully by recasting Lydia as a figure of intrigue playing a long con to protect what women she can and eventually bring about Gilead’s destruction.
All of the best moments of The Testaments take place in Ardua Hall, a former college now occupied by the Aunts who rule over the female half of Gilead’s society. The book diverges from the pious backstory that the show developed for Lydia and instead shows her as an accomplished judge who’s ripped out of her life and tortured into submission by Gilead’s founders. She’s managed to eke out power for herself and her fellows by appeasing male egos and concocting subtle plots to gain allies and punish enemies. One of her biggest accomplishments was allowing young women who don’t fit in to the strict confines of Gilead to join the Aunts, where they serve as Pearl Girls, missionaries who also act as her spies and recruiters.
Lydia’s plot is so involved that the other protagonists can’t help but feel like flimsy accessories by comparison. Nicole helps provide an outsider’s perspective on Gilead and the Mayday movement devoted to helping the people trapped there, but she reads as a generic dystopian YA protagonist, while Agnes comes across as a character from a feminist fairy tale as she tries to defy her wicked stepmother’s wishes that she marry a powerful Commander whose brides have a history of dying young. While the characters are thin, Atwood breathes life into them with vibrant prose, as in this passage from Agnes’ perspective: “She really did believe that marriage would obliterate her. She would be crushed, she would be nullified, she would be melted like snow until nothing remained of her.”
Atwood expands on the fascinating world-building of The Handmaid’s Tale by examining how life is lived by the rest of the women of Gilead. She’s invented new morbid playground games that have replaced songs about plague with ones about executions. She also imagines new ways for girls to torment each other, with the number of servants, or Marthas, each family has becoming a public token of status. Atwood reveals that while the Commanders may claim responsibility for all the rules and rituals of Gilead, they have merely followed in the paths of so many men before them and coopted women’s work. The Testaments also addresses holes in The Handmaid’s Tale’s plot, like how Gilead would avoid incest if babies are rarely raised by their biological parents.
Hulu’s show has long relied upon portraits of female suffering, and those can certainly still be found in The Testaments. The Handmaid’s Tale has only felt more relevant in recent years, and The Testaments seems particularly keyed in to the #MeToo movement as it reveals that the oppression that the men of Gilead unleash on women is far from limited to official laws like requiring conservative dress and banning them from reading. Handmaids become convenient scapegoats in the schemes of Commanders and their wives, and sexual assault goes unpunished because girls are taught they are to blame for any unwanted advances. Atwood is able to explore these issues in a way that feels honest without being exploitative, making the show feel even more gratuitous by comparison.
Similarly, the show’s presumable mandate to keep the story going for as long as audiences will keep subscribing means that it’s had to constantly invent new setbacks for its characters to allow them to seem to have agency and then strip it away. The primary plot can slow to a crawl, overly padded by stories that only show how miserable things are in Gilead. While The Testaments starts slow, particularly as it builds up its young characters and gets them to the point when they can actively participate in Lydia’s schemes, the novel eventually delivers powerful drama that strips away the gray of moral relativism and lets its heroes shine through feats of courage, sacrifice, and cunning.
Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments end on a hopeful note, something that’s desperately needed after so many pages filled with horror and despair. If The Handmaid’s Tale was about one woman desperately trying to reclaim some scrap of agency and largely relying on the mercy of others, The Testaments is a far more empowering story of three women working together to make a difference for themselves and the world. It’s the sort of story that readers and viewers could use more of at a time when Gilead seems closer than ever.
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The Hulu series has no legacy beyond one of a thousand embarrassing adaptations before it and a fanbase that either ignores its flaws or continues to watch in spite of them. The best way to honor Atwood would be to ignore it entirely. The best thing that can be said of it is that it lines her pockets so that she can continue to work while showrunners tarnish her stories on the small screen.
I disagree. The first season was legitimately good and had some fantastic performances, chief among them Moss’s. I haven’t finished the second season, however, because it felt like it was just spinning wheels.
This exactly. The show was good only insofar as it was able to draw on the source material. The plot gymnastics involved in ensuring that the show could continue into a second and third season with the same cast just became silly. Having read The Testaments, one of the things I liked most about it is that very few characters carry over from the original book.
I really hate it when shows promise a new status quo and then revert things immediately. Season two ends with Offred finally escaping and I was excited to see what happens next. And then I start watching season 2 and she’s back in Gilead in the same position with the same family within the first four episodes. It was all just a big tease. And given how mixed the reviews have been in season 3, I think I may be done for good.
The end of the book is the end of Season 1, everything after that is hulu’s writers.
Yep. Definitely the same problem that plagued the later seasons of Game of Thrones.
did you get the attention you wanted?
I’m still only 2/3 of the way through it but thank you for posting this review. If it weren’t the sequel to “Handmaid’s Tale”, with all the baggage that brings to it, so far I’d be giving it a solid B+. It builds slowly, but I’m at the point where the threads are starting to come together and the tension is palpable.
It sounds like we can tell Colby Cosh his fears regarding the sequel were misplaced.
I’ve always thought the show already made Lydia one of the most interesting characters. Serena obviously regrets the hell out of what she helped create, and acts accordingly. Lydia knows she has to keep up certain appearances while routinely showing ambivalence about whether to mother the girls or take our her frustrations on them.
So she wrote a book so that the show would have more material? Oh, Margaret. Looks like the bastards finally got you down, huh? Should have just left your masterpiece well enough alone.
https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/margaret-atwoods-urgent-new-tale-of-gilead/‘…why—after 30 years of resistance to the idea—she decided The Testaments was not only doable but should be done. “I’d been thinking about it for a while, though my first thought always was I’d have to be out of my mind to do it,” she confessed. “People had been saying ‘sequel’ for years, and I always said no because I thought what they meant—and what they did mean—was a sequel featuring Offred as the central voice. I could not have done that.” But when history took “a different turn” with Donald Trump, “I reconsidered and thought of a different way of approaching the question. Gilead ends—we know that because we’re told that in the first book—but we’re not told how. So the collapse of totalitarianism takes many forms. Which form could this one take?”’
The problem with this sequel and the TV show is that the original book was allegory. Thus the plot holes. It was never meant to be a detailed description of how Gilead happened or what it would look like because that wasn’t important to the ideas Atwood was working with. Oryx and Crake was meant to be finely detailed and those sequels work better. The mistake was taking Handmaid’s Tale out of the realm of allegory.
It’s not like Atwood hasn’t done sequels before – Oryx & Crake has two, making it an actual trilogy. Just like a fantasy/s-f writer!My theory, without having read the book yet? I bet it’s good.
Oh, it is. It’s the best work she’s done in some time (I enjoyed the Oryx & Crake series, but The Testaments is better).
That’s what I wanted to hear. The only Atwood I’ve read is Handmaid’s and the Oryx & Crake books (I know, I know, I should read more of hers) – but A Handmaid’s Tale is literally one of my favorite books and I reread it every couple of years.
Blind Assassin is probably her best actually. You should really read that. The Robber Bride is also outstanding.
Agreed about Blind Assassin. So so so good. My runner-ups are Cat’s Eye and Lady Oracle, although I haven’t read the latter in years.
And of course there is Alias Grace (both Grace and Handmaid’s Tale were assigned to me in school—full disclosure, which maybe a Canadian thing) which has a lot of her best writing (and a fine miniseries on Netflix done with the CBC as well from Mary Harron and Sarah Polly, which loses her prose of course but I preferred to even season one of Handmaid’s Tale). Speaking of Atwood adaptations, stay far, far, far away from the bizarrely awful Canadian TV movie of The Robber Bride with Mary-Louise Parker and a young Tatiana Maslaney, but it is also one of her best novels as is Blind Assassin.
Oh and there are also her comic books Angel Catbird and War Bears but, errr, I haven’t bothered with them…
Or she obviously saw how well the show is doing which caused sales of her book to rise and she saw that this is the perfect time for a new one. Also, there is no way anything new can ruin something from the past.
Hell, if I had written a book that became a popular TV show, I would capitalize on it too by writing a sequel. Especially if a publisher drove a dump truck full of money up to my house; I’m not made of stone!!
Four words: Go Set a Watchman.
The book feels…slight. More like the novelization of a TV season than a book. Plus, the plot makes so little sense…the plan is so utterly convoluted and massively over complicated.
I really enjoyed the book. It wasn’t as literary as the first but still very enjoyable.
Good review. I’ll put a slightly different spin on it: Ardua Hall felt very much like the setting of The Handmaid’s Tale book. The remainder of The Testaments didn’t, and as the book progressed those storylines became more prominent. Ultimately, that weakness played into the conclusion feeling manufactured rather than a logical outcome.The part that amused me most was that I’d argued for years – and taken a lot of grief for it – that it felt to me like Atwood had intended to imply there was a separate matriarchy that was just as terrifying as the patriarchy of the Commanders and had nearly as much power, just in a more subtle form.Lo and behold, Lydia’s conversation with the Commander as she sets up the Aunts indeed makes that explicit. I will be very curious as to Atwood’s answer as to how she sketched this out thirty something years ago and how long she’d known about Lydia’s central role in it.Overall, it wasn’t a bad book and better than many late life sequels, but it was neither profound like the first nor something that demands to be read again.
“often attempting to elicit sympathy for rapists, torturers, murderers, and those who condone and are complicit in such crimes.”It’s always weird to see people criticize creators for this like they’re actually doing or condoning this stuff in real life. It’s characters in fiction. People need to calm down.
Saying “it’s fiction,” is a meaningless statement. What a person writes in their fiction is, obviously, informed by their personal philosophy and morality. It doesn’t mean that there is an easy one-to-one match, but fiction which says, “It’s time to give these suffering rapists more attention and understanding,” is saying something.
Total fucking bullshit. Especially when you’re writing for villains.
The fact that you read a character to be a “villain” within a story means that the author has conveyed a moral stance to you. I mean, that’s basically why propagandistic fiction can be so effective. This isn’t really revolutionary or shocking. It’s kind of how fiction has functioned for millennia.
That is a good point, but the fact that an author puts reprehensible behavior in a novel clearly does not mean the author condones it. Is Crime and Punishment an etiquette guide?
Yeah. That’s why I said there was no one-to-one match. And Crime and Punishment is a weird example to use here, since it is a novel explicitly about morality and ethics. So to the extent that any novel is, C&P was written as a moral guide. Writing about evil doesn’t mean you approve of evil. But what you’re writing says is “evil” and how you depict it within your story says rather a lot about what you think evil is.
I mean, it kind of is? Obviously Dostoyevsky wasn’t condoning murder by depicting it. But his deeper message was that Western-derived liberal individualism is bad, and that it leads people to engage in immoral behavior like murder. Whereas more traditionally Russian ideas about hierarchy and living within externally imposed laws of God and the tsar are good, because they temper those sinful, egotistical impulses. He wasn’t just writing art for art’s sake, he was definitely using his pen to advance a specific set of beliefs.
I’m kind of off on a tangent here, I just love Dostoyevsky’s writing despite hating his politics and I like to talk about it.
Yeah, I’ll never forget the time Stephen King started a fire with his mind and burned all those government agents.Novelists don’t really advocate everything their characters do.I think Mark Twain was against slavery, I’ll give you that one.
You don’t think one of the themes of “Carrie” was about exploring why a misunderstood outcast might explode with terrible and unfocused violence? It’s not even that subtle.
I forgot that Carrie was a pyrokinetic too! I was thinking of Charlie from Firestarter and thought that maybe King wouldn’t condone the actual blazing murder of government employees. But maybe he would. I might too.
Maybe he wouldn’t condone it. But I’m not sure what point you’re making. One doesn’t have to “condone” something to feel sympathetic to it. Like, people say all the time, “XYZ crime is certainly bad, but ABC punishment is excessive.” Also, people have been using the supernatural to explore politics and morality for at least decades (e.g. the X-men). A character who kills government agents in fiction can be a vehicle of exploring the author’s less extreme mistrust of government.Like would you really say, “I don’t know why you’re dragging communism into Animal Farm. It’s fiction. Talking animals don’t exist.”?
If you’re a fiction writer you have got to sympathize with your characters, otherwise they end up feeling like cardboard cutouts of people, rather than real people. You have to see even the worst people as full human beings. As a reader, I’d much rather read a nuanced character who does terrible things, than an “evil” character.
Well yeah, obviously. What does that have to do with anything? If a character has “nuance” the author is, a priori, depicting certain traits as positive and certain traits as negative, right? Acting like authors are perfectly neutral observers is silly. Their morality informs their work. And why shouldn’t it? I want to hear the author’s unique voice, not some weird stab at utter neutrality.
Does this book tie into the last 2 seasons in any way or is it more in line with being a simple follow-up to the book? I dropped out a few episodes into season 2, so I have no idea if I’d miss anything in regards to this.
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