Who can blame her for not playing fair?
She gets to show off a little.
Of course, we’ve also got an ongoing TV show to consider.
Credit: Nan A. Talese
It’s whyThe Testaments' publication has been subject to much speculation.
(The fourth season will premiere in 2020.)
(Her name, like Nicole’s, was previously, exclusively revealed in the TV show.)
Liam Sharp
1 best-seller 30 years after its publication.
And it’s whyThe Testaments, too, hums with such urgency.
In the sequel, Atwood focuses on how tyrannical regimes destroy themselves.
Her command of these mechanisms is, unsurprisingly, astonishing.
Atwood does chart Gilead’s rise again, though, albeit from a fresh perspective.
“How can I regain myself?
How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?”
Atwood is fascinated by the erosion of the ordinary a timely theme, certainly.
The contrastsThe Testamentsdraws within Gilead are exceedingly blunt.
The exceptions are Agnes and Nicole.
Thus they’re imbued into her perspective.
Atwood deftly balances her three narrators as her plot hurtles forward, but her characterization is lacking.
Agnes, at least, has the Gilead factor to explain why.
But Nicole is elusive.
(“Think of me as a guide.
Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood.
It’s about to get darker.")
The pair ran in morally and functionally opposite directions upon Gilead’s uprising.
“How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly?
you will ask,” she writes in her final section.
“You yourself would never have done such things!
But you yourself will never have had to.”
There’s that notion of ordinariness again.
But they’re soon tasked to live up to their mother’s legacy, to fight back.
How long has Atwood had this book in her?
The pacing is flawless.
The prose is lean, mean, and charged.
