Margaret Atwood · 2019 · Dystopian novel
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Set some fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s sequel shows the Republic of Gilead through three women’s accounts. Aunt Lydia, one of the founders of the regime’s system for controlling women, is secretly writing a record of her life and her power. Agnes, raised in a privileged Commander’s household, is being prepared for an arranged marriage and begins to doubt what she has been taught. Daisy, a teenager growing up in Toronto, discovers that her life is tied to Gilead in ways she never suspected.
As the three stories converge, the novel shows the regime from the inside at a time when it is starting to crack. It shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.
Key insights
- Authoritarian regimes often decay from within; hypocrisy, fear and rivalry among the powerful make Gilead weaker than it looks.
- Compromise can be survival and complicity at once; Aunt Lydia’s account asks what collaboration costs and what it might make possible.
- Information is power; secrets, files and testimony serve as tools of control, as leverage and, eventually, as a means of telling the truth.
- Oppressive systems recruit some of the oppressed to police others; the Aunts hold real but narrow power over Gilead’s women.
- Children raised inside an ideology can still question it; Agnes’s doubts grow as she notices the gap between what she is taught and what she sees.
Read it if you have read The Handmaid’s Tale and want a faster-paced look at how Gilead worked and began to weaken.