Book Review: Her Brave New World

 Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments read like one long book split across thirty four years, and the real subject only comes into focus once you read them together. The first book puts you inside a theocracy already in power, with no way to know whether it will last. The second book answers that question from the other side, fifteen years on, once Gilead has already begun to come apart. Read as a pair, these are a single story about how a society gets built, how it holds itself together, and what it takes to bring it down. The couplet's real argument is that all three of those stages run on the same fuel, people who go along with something they know is wrong because going along is what keeps them alive.

Both books end with a scholarly epilogue set generations later, historians picking through recordings and manuscripts trying to work out what really happened. Atwood built that device into the very first book, before there was any sequel to justify it, which means the promise that Gilead eventually becomes a subject for footnotes rather than a live threat was there from page one. The Testaments plant the ending of a story you will not write for another three decades.

My own book group read The Testaments and liked it. Somewhere in our discussion we landed on the idea that these books are not really about an imagined world so much as a real tendency, one that shows up at different strengths in different places and times, including inside societies that consider themselves settled and free. Atwood herself has said the same thing, that nothing in Gilead was invented, only assembled from pieces that had already happened somewhere. Sitting with both books back to back, that argument gets harder to wave off as fiction and easier to read as history with the names changed.

The character, Offred carries the first book almost entirely on her own attention, and the power of her narration comes from how little of it is devoted to plot. She spends far more time noticing than acting, cataloging small objects and small cruelties with a precision that only makes sense once you realize noticing is close to the only freedom she has left. Her story ends without an answer, and the book is better for refusing to give her one.

The character who does the most work across both books, though, is Aunt Lydia, and I think she gets less credit for it than she deserves. In the first book she is barely a person, just a set of rules delivered in a raised voice. The Testaments goes back and gives her an entire life, a judge before Gilead, tortured and coerced into becoming one of its architects, and then spending years working from inside the system to help end it. She is the hinge the whole couplet turns on. Agnes and Daisy get the more conventional arc, sheltered girl and displaced girl finding out they are sisters and carrying the evidence that finally brings Gilead down, and that story has real momentum. But it is Lydia's complicity, not their courage, that makes the ending possible at all.

Where the books are thinnest is in how they handle race. Gilead's Black population is relocated off the page in a single line, called the Children of Ham and shipped to homelands that never appear again in either book. Meanwhile the machinery of the story borrows directly from the history of American slavery, women renamed and stripped of surnames, reading forbidden to them by law, and applies all of it to the suffering of white women almost exclusively. Critics have called this out.

The cost of Gilead's fall is not shared evenly among the people who helped bring it about, and Atwood does not pretend otherwise.  Gilead trains its own citizens to live under the belief that they are always being watched, on the theory that people who think they are seen will behave.

Both books, in their own way, ask the same thing of the reader: watch closely enough, and dressed in different clothes, could this still happen here?