Within the criminal elements of any tyranny, a functionary is secretly taking names, compiling documents, recording stories, preparing “destroying angels” for the right time to release everything to maximum effect, in short, to begin or to accelerate the destruction of that tyranny. Sometimes that functionary is a true hero, a person who sees the wrong and determines to risk everything to make it known. More often, the witness is one who was complicit in its evil. The Testaments is a story of vengeance patiently gathered and vengeance taken on the regime by one who helped execute some of its worst orders.
As a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, we learn more about how Gilead works and are also given snapshots of histories we must imaginatively construct; for example, how the Mayday Resistance launched attacks upon the government “from the Missouri Hill Country …, from Utah, the Republic of Texas…, most parts of the West Coast.” There are other novels within this book that we must envision.
Atwood, in A Handmaid’s Tale, spoke of not inventing methods or events that had not already occurred elsewhere in recent history. She appears to have continued in that vein. Thus, In The Testaments, we have this episode:
Women are assembled in a stadium for “a spectacle”.
“Twenty women in business attire [are] led into the center of a field.”
“Their hands were cuffed in front.”
A man orates that “sinners [are] always visible to the Divine Eye and their sin would find them out.”
“An undertone like assent, like a vibration, [comes] from the guards and attendants. Mmmmm … like a motor revving up.”
“…the men who’d escorted the blindfolded women raised their guns and shot them (117-118).”
You have seen this show before — in film from World War II, from ISIS and Taliban tapes, in reporting from Bosnia and Kosovo.
Atwood reminds us that fanatics are always motivated by hatred of others not like them. Out of that hatred they create the permission necessary to cage and defile those ‘others’ because no one unlike them can be innocent and therefore deserve mercy. They begin by saying, ‘Up is now down’ and ‘Wrong is now right’. They say, ‘These ideas are poison, these others are poison, these books are poison’. On and on. They always end by proclaiming, ‘We know all that is true. Now, Obey!’
Yet, this is a hopeful book. It demonstrates that tyrannies cannot last. Their corruptions and cruelties, which are as inherent to them as DNA, will not only create resistance, but will also degrade their very ability to rule.
The Testaments could not come to us at a better time.
