It’s a decision that’s the reverse of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s ‘first draft’ of To Kill A Mockingbird which stars an alternate, overtly racist Atticus Finch. The news is very much out there that none other than Aunt Lydia, Gilead’s most terrifying enforcer (in the “women’s sphere” of fertility and domesticity at least), is one of the three narrators. Will we see middle-aged, morally conflicted, childfree women dressing in the drab, brown robes of the Aunts to make some sort of feminist statement? I doubt it. The “spring green” palette of the teenage brides-to-be is affecting but ambiguous. None of Atwood’s new colour and costume-coded social classes are likely to make a similar leap to internationally recognised meme. Nothing Atwood could write could give that image more power than it already has it’s complete.

It’s a shrewd move that allows Atwood to return to themes of subjugation, sexual crimes and sisterhood without getting boxed in by her original protagonist Offred, the Handmaids and all the protests and parodies stored within those red robes and white bonnets. Handmaid plotlines in The Testaments are there mostly to propel our new heroines’ emotional and intellectual journeys. the events of the original book) but also offers fresh perspectives on familiar rituals, and new concoctions like Rubies Premarital Preparatory school for teen Wives-to-be, and the Pearl Girls missionary program. Each character’s tale overlaps in some ways with Offred’s tapes (i.e. Through their narrow viewpoint, we return to the homes and schools of Gilead, which is at war – possibly on multiple fronts – fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. That said, Atwood is far more concerned with the lives of Aunts (women who supervise, among other things, Handmaids training), Supplicants (Aunts-in-training), Wives (the privileged spouses of Gilead’s ruling class of Commanders), and the children of Handmaids, who are raised by Commanders and their Wives.

Handmaids are never far from the minds and stories of the three narrators in The Testaments, which include Agnes Jemima, who comes of age in Gilead, and Daisy who looks on in horror from Canada. It would have been easy for Atwood to revisit the red cloaks and build on the memes, but instead she focuses on women who are serving Gilead’s interests in different ways.

Margaret atwood the testaments