The whole book provides one for Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid's Tale. In the first novel, Offred assumes Aunt Lydia to be a staunch loyalist to the Gilead regime working out her sadistic tendencies on the women entrusted to her dubious care. The Testaments reveals she hated Gilead at least as much as Offred did, and spent literally twenty years playing the long game — and doing whatever she had to do to accumulate power and protection for herself in the meantime, including her terrible actions in the first novel — to bring it all down.
Even within The Testaments itself, there's a couple of viewpoints one could adopt for Aunt Lydia. Was she a crusader for greater justice, who never forgot her background as a family law judge and spent twenty years as The Mole within Gilead all for the greater good of women and children? Or was she so furious at how Gilead's architects stripped her of her titles and literally beat her into submission that she did it all for personal revenge? There's enough evidence in the text to support either interpretation; and of course, there's nothing to suggest it can't be a mix of both.
Base-Breaking Character: Aunt Lydia. To note, this is an example invoked by the production team from the Hulu series, who opted to make Testaments its own standalone work after initially attempting to set it within the same continuity as the parent series, noting that the former's portrayal of the character was functionally incompatible with the latter. Lydia is revealed to be The Chessmaster who was Good All Along, meaning that everything she did in the original book (including plenty of For the Evulz moments) were completely faked so she could ingratiate herself within Gileadean society.
To fans of the first book, is it just as good as the original novel? Or does it suffer from Sequelitis? What doesn't help is the fact the book borrows elements from the television series.
The book also inspired a Fandom Rivalry with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other after both books were awarded the 2019 Booker Prize — a decision made after the deciding jury opted to ignore a rule set in place several decades earlier (that only one book could be awarded the prize) — and caused no end of complaints that the jury had deliberately caved to pressure to award Atwood for a book that, charitably speaking, did not receive nearly the same kind of glowing response at launch that The Handmaid's Tale did.
Complete Monster: Commander Judd is one of the architects of Gilead and a chief designer of the Aunt and Handmaid system, promoting horrific slavery for countless women. A pedophile himself, Judd is known for marrying disturbingly young girls to rape them as he wishes, before clandestinely murdering them once they start to bore him, covering up the deaths and observing a "mourning period" before choosing his next victim.
Genius Bonus: The cafeteria at Ardua Hall is called the Schlafly Café, a reference to Phyllis Schlafly, a noted real-world opponent of feminism, women's rights, and gay rights who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment in the US during the 1970s. Doubles as a Take That! since, while Schlafly would presumably have felt right at home in Gilead, it's clear Atwood's views don't tally with hers very much. (She's also believed to have been one of the major real-world inspirations for Serena Joy in the first novel, which means Atwood called her out twice.)
Attempts by the book's publishers (Penguin Random House / Doubleday / McClelland & Stewart) to levy draconian non-disclosure agreements against independent retailers and reviewers (to prevent spoilers from leaking out) were all for naught when Amazon mistakenly sent out several hundred copies of the book a week before its street date, causing key story beats to get out early. Despite that, retailers were still hamstrung by the same agreements, leading to anger against both Amazon and the respective publishers and causing critics to break their review embargos early.
The book's post-publication period was marred by a contentious Booker Prize ceremony — after Bernardine Evaristo's Girl. Woman. Other was announced as the 2019 winner, the jury shocked the audience in attendance by announcing that The Testaments would share the prize, thus throwing out a rule established nearly three decades prior (in 1992) that expressly deterred such a decision due to the controversy it would cause. As such, the decision led to allegations of favoritism and racism (that being a Black nominee could not win on their own merits), not helped by promotional materials and interviews for The Testaments making it look like the book was the sole winner of the award.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: For all the novel's attempts to cast Aunt Lydia in a heroic light, this is the same character who inflicted all manner of atrocities on the Handmaids over several decades, making it a case of crocodile tears when the plot tries to have the reader sympathize with her after her plan is set in motion.
, a noted real-world opponent of feminism, women's rights, and gay rights who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment in the US during the 1970s. Doubles as a Take That! since, while Schlafly would presumably have felt right at home in Gilead, it's clear Atwood's views don't tally with hers very much. (She's also believed to have been one of the major real-world inspirations for Serena Joy in the first novel, which means Atwood called her out twice.)