![]() In Lydia’s world view, people rise and fall by strength or weakness, and justice is a kind of theatre. The story is driven and described by the infamous Aunt Lydia, and she is just as terrifying, in her astringency, as you would expect her to be. The most compelling portrait is that of wickedness – of course it is. There are three narrators, two of them young and idealistic, one of them old and endlessly cunning. ![]() The novel picks up 15 or 16 years after Offred disappears to an unknown fate at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. ![]() She is interested not in how people become degraded, as objects (that is so easily done), but how they became morally compromised. In The Testaments, Atwood reclaims the right to consider such difficulties rather than simply imagine them. It was sometimes hard to look, or to look away. The series became a kind of visual enlargement of the agonies of the age, or the female agonies at least. ![]() Atwood certainly has had an enormous amount to think about since her novel went supernova, not just as the hugely successful television adaptation, but as a powerful symbol of resistance to the misogyny of Donald Trump and the Christian rightwing. ![]()
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