Reading 'The Testaments' pulled me into a layered conversation, and the narrators are the engine of that conversation. The three voices are Aunt Lydia, Agnes (often called Agnes Jemima), and Daisy (who is also known later as Nicole). Aunt Lydia writes in a sharp, retrospective register—part confessional, part bureaucratic record—so her voice feels like a
Cross between a
memoir and a legal deposit of facts. She’s the insider who knows how
Gilead runs and who also wants to justify, explain, or perhaps unburden herself. Her sections read like someone trying to get the truth down before it’s lost; they’re meticulous, morally messy, and full of those small details that reveal how a system gets built and maintained.
Agnes and Daisy give you the lived effects of that system from two very different angles. Agnes grows up inside Gilead: her observations are intimate, shaped by the rituals, silences, and limited language available to women there. Daisy grows up in Canada, raised outside Gilead’s rules, and her voice is younger and more present-tense, filled with curiosity and a sense of discovery as she learns about her origins. Together the trio lets Margaret Atwood map power from multiple compass points—
the enforcer, the insider who adapted or survived, and the person shaped by exile or removal from that world. That multiplicity is why these particular narrators matter: they make the
novel less a single polemic and more a human, morally complicated archive, which I
Found both haunting and strangely satisfying to read.