ST. LOUIS - Blessed be the fruit of Margaret Atwood's beautiful brain. "The Testaments," the highly anticipated sequel to her 1985 dystopian masterpiece "The Handmaid's Tale," is satisfyingly full of answers; a gift. If you sense a certain calm in the world upon its release Sept. 10, it will be the sound of Handmaid's Nation becoming lost in 415 wonderful new pages.
The developments will delight fans of the original novel and the television adaptation on Hulu, who have been pining to know what becomes of Offred - the young mother stripped of her daughter, her rights and her name and enslaved as a walking womb - and of Gilead, the literal-minded theocratic dictatorship that has knocked the former United States back to 17th-century Puritanical roots.
Those answers have remained tantalizingly out of reach for nearly 35 years. The final chapter of the original novel revealed that Gilead would fall and offered a glimmer of hope that Offred escaped. But it did not say how.
The must-watch Hulu series, recently renewed for a fourth season, for which Atwood has worked as a consultant, has piled on astonishing performances and rightly raked in awards. It has become a cultural touchstone at a time when many see its main themes developing in real life. Repudiation of science, repeal of reproductive rights, attacks on journalism, white supremacy, roundups of immigrants, family separations - all were precursors to Gilead's rise.
Atwood, winner of the St. Louis Literary Award in 2017, told the Post-Dispatch in an interview then that she would rather that headlines not follow the arc of her stories.
"If I had a choice between these books not being current, plus literary oblivion, or their being current, plus increased attention to these books, I would choose the first," she said. "I would prefer that they not be current. Because the fact that they are current means there is a lot of unhappiness being caused."
Although Hulu expanded the Handmaid's universe with new characters and events, both before and after the coup, it has also frustrated viewers by keeping Offred's arc on spin cycle.
The net sum of three seasons is that Offred, whose real name is revealed to be June Osborne, has hardened into a leader in a resistance that can barely make a dent in the regime's armor. She smuggles one daughter, baby Nicole, to Canada but stays behind to try in vain to locate her older daughter, Hannah. Meanwhile, her husband sulks in Toronto and shows up for the occasional protest. What the hell, Luke?
"The Testaments" quickly distinguishes itself from the oppressive tone of the original novel, folding in events from the TV series and marching briskly forward with June's battle-ready spirit. Elements of humor abound, with wry reminders of Gilead's origins. (Snort laugh: a Gilead cafe named after anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly.)
Violence is no longer meant to shock or sink in. That wouldn't work after all this time, all this pain. Now it's a plot device that interlaces with hope and heroism and intrigue to carry a great story. In other words, like a feature film. And that could very well be in the works, as Hulu is developing "The Testaments" for the screen.
In an interview with Time, Atwood, who turns 80 in November, said the sequel would also mark an end to "wheel spinning" on the Hulu series. "They have to move her along - and I've given them lots of ways of how that would happen."
"The Testaments" begins 17 years after the events of the original novel and finds Gilead rotting from the inside out, licking its wounds from a long-running war with the Republic of Texas and barely able to protect its border with Canada. Baby Nicole is still missing after all these years. Her face is everywhere, a rallying point for a nation struggling for legitimacy among its own citizenry and in the world.
Three women take turns telling the story, and Offred is not one of them. The mystery of her fate haunts and informs the story, but her existence is barely hinted at. Nor does the story mention Fred and Serena Waterford, the first Gilead couple to "own" Offred, last seen at the end of Season 3 in custody in Canada for war crimes against her.
Two of the narrators are young women who are strangers to each other. One grew up in Gilead and the other in Canada. You can guess who they might be.
The third is a woman who is not so young: Aunt Lydia, the ruthless, nun-like enforcer from "The Handmaid's Tale" entrusted to the regime's most essential task, that of assigning fertile women to the households of Gilead elite to be ritually raped and impregnated.
Like baby Nicole, Aunt Lydia is a national icon. For her contributions to the nation's foundation, her followers leave tributes at the base of her statue outside Ardua Hall, a convent-like structure where she presides over the Aunts who enforce gender roles of Gilead's women and girls. She also runs the Pearl Girls, missionaries who venture into Canada to find lost girls of the north and sell them on the virtues of making babies south of the border, and can double as spies or terrorists when it suits her plan.
Lydia is not so gung-ho for Gilead these days. Her clandestine intelligence operation has been collecting dirt on Gilead's elite for more than a decade, and it's ugly. To borrow a phrase from the first book, the bastards have ground her down. The biggest of all is Commander Judd, the mastermind behind the coup that put Gilead in power, whose serial killings of his own child brides have been neatly covered up to protect the regime's reputation.
Lydia channels her disgust into diary pages she tucks into library walls for generations to find - she hopes - after Gilead's eventual collapse. Although no less a monster, Lydia earns sympathy. Her alternative had been death. As she explains, "Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurdled at you."
The delightful twist is that June's anger and indignation is finally embodied in the one person in Gilead with the power to make a difference - and it's not just a woman, of all people, under his eye, it's Aunt Lydia.
"The Testaments" has already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and will be in the running for countless more honors. It may not endure as a monumental work of literature like "The Handmaid's Tale," but that surely was not Atwood's goal. She has a story to tell. It's her story. She owns it. People want more of it, and she's going to keep telling it as long as she can and in any format she chooses.