The Guardian
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another are grim parables of today. But they are not without hope As Margaret Atwood has said , all dystopian fiction is “really about now”. No wonder the genre is flourishing. This week Atwood’s bleak vision of a future America as a patriarchal theocracy returned to TV screens with the adaptation of her prize-winning 2019 novel The Testaments , the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another , set in a chillingly recognisable militarised America, swept the Oscars last month. Back in 1984 when Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, she feared that its central premise – that the US could be transformed from a liberal democracy into Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship after a coup – was too outrageous to convince readers. She need not have worried. By the time the novel was made into the award-winning TV series in 2017 , it was all too believable. Arriving just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the rollback of women’s rights, the show felt made for the moment. Atwood was hailed as a prophet. The red-and-white handmaid robes became a symbol of female defiance across the globe. “For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back,” Atwood said of her decision to write a follow-up more than 30 years later. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...
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