The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last (2015)
by Margaret Atwood

Clearly, Margaret Atwood is a little bit awesome. She's been short-listed for the Booker Prize FIVE TIMES, for The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Cat's Eye in 1988, Alias Grace in 1996, The Blind Assassin in 2000 and Oryx & Crake in 2003 (all of which are well worth checking out, if you haven't already read them). Over a forty-six year career, Margaret Atwood has written poetry, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, children's books and screenplays. Obviously there's not much she can't do. She is fantastic and her new novel The Heart Goes Last is just a bit more fantastic to add to the collection.

Set in the near future, amid economic collapse, The Heart Goes Last is the story of married couple Stan and Charmaine. Barely scraping by on one very small wage and sleeping in their car, they constantly fear for their own physical safety and dream of financial security. Desperate, Stan and Charmaine sign up for a "social experiment" called the Positron Project. Resettled in the safe and pleasant town of Consilience, Stan and Charmaine have a lovely new home, steady employment, security, plenty to eat and drink... There's just one minor downside - they spend every second month in prison, switching places with another couple (their "alternates") who live in their lovely home while Stan and Charmaine are incarcerated.
Not perfect, perhaps, but still a notable improvement in circumstances - even in prison there is great food, rewarding jobs and busy social calendars. Styled to resemble 1950s America "because that was the decade in which most people had self-identified as being happy", Consilience offers Stan and Charmaine a fabulous new lifestyle and they couldn't be happier. At first. Over time, both Stan and Charmaine become increasingly fixated on their mysterious alternates, as their marriage begins to implode and Consilience's sunny veneer begins to crack.

Consilience. Presumably a little something like this.

Margaret Atwood's writing has been described as "speculative fiction" - it's kind of like Science Fiction, but not exactly, because the science parts are largely absent (no aliens or time travel or spaceships), the settings aren't too far removed from the present day, and the themes are universal. Originally written as a series of short e-books, The Heart Goes Last is exactly this kind of story. Initially dark and dystopian, the tone lightens over the course of the book as it becomes surrealistic, chaotic and genuinely funny. There are squads of gay Elvis impersonators, an ex-prostitute obsessively in love with a blue teddy bear, sexbots and chicken farms used for nefarious purposes (amongst a whole lot of other oddness). It's dark and sinister and cautionary in parts, but it's also delightfully weird, with a tone reminiscent of some of Chuck Palahniuk's best work (Lullaby and Invisible Monsters spring to mind).

I'm just going to leave this here...

It's unique and a little strange, but never lightweight - there are some pretty deep themes lurking in there, around free will and the sacrifices we're prepared to make for security, around sexism and relationships and the ways in which we misunderstand other people. As you'd expect from Margaret Atwood, it's also fantastically well-written - so compelling that I blasted through the whole thing in one day - and it leaves you with something to ponder. Fabulous.

9/10

Fortunately, the Milk

Fortunately, the Milk (2013)
by Neil Gaiman

There are plenty of times when being a parent is just a little bit shit. Having kids means that you have no money, no spare time, no nice things, no decent sleep and usually no real idea of where you are or what you're meant to be doing.
There are some times, though, when being a parent is kind of cool. Having a legitimate excuse to read a children's book while introducing your child to the joys of fantastically weird fiction - well, that's one of those times. If I didn't have kids, I probably never would have read Fortunately, the Milk, and following on from the soul-destroying masterpiece I'd recently finished reading (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara), this book was exactly what I needed.

Written by the incomparable Neil Gaiman (Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Ocean at the End of the Lane - if you're not already familiar with Neil Gaiman, I suggest you pop into your local library immediately) and delightfully illustrated by Chris Riddell, Fortunately, the Milk is the story of a dad who pops out to buy milk. Returning home with the milk after an unexpectedly long delay, Dad is asked what took him so long. What follows is a fantastical tale of adventure, suspense and inter-dimensional time travel with Dad striving to protect the milk and bring it home to his children.

"Dad" and Neil Gaiman himself - not dissimilar in appearance...

Fortunately, the Milk includes everything a kid could possibly want in a book. And I really do mean everything. There are aliens, pirates, time-travelling dinosaurs, explosions, hot air balloons, a volcano god, vampires and sparkly ponies, to name just a few. There is not a single boring sentence to be found.
All of which makes this a great choice for reading to kids because it's charming and interesting and funny for adults, too. It also means that kids love it. My son is six, so still relatively new to this whole reading thing (and possibly a little younger than the target audience) and this book was an absolute revelation for him. I have never seen him quite so captivated by a book - any book that can make a six-year-old ignore video games has got to be a winner.

We bought the electronic version of Fortunately, the Milk for 99c on Amazon. Bargain! It looks like it's gone back up to $4 now, but this is still a pretty small price to pay for absolute brilliance. The version we bought also includes embedded video of Neil Gaiman introducing the book and discussing parts of the story - unfortunately my Kindle is not fancy enough to do this, so instead we just got a sad-looking "Your device does not support video playback" message. If you have a slightly fancier device, however, I'm sure that this would add to the whole experience.

I don't know why this photo insists on turning itself sideways, but you get the idea...

There are plenty of people despairing about kids spending too much time staring at screens and not enough time reading. The best way to get kids reading? Give them something fantastic to read (and stop trying to ban books, of course)!
Reading should be fun. If books were more fun than TV and Minecraft, kids would probably choose to read a lot more often and books like Fortunately, the Milk are doing a great job of making reading WAY more fun than anything on TV.

If you happen to know any children, buy this book and read it to them. If you don't know any kids, just buy it for yourself - who wouldn't enjoy a story about a time-travelling Stegosaurus?

The time-travelling dinosaur in question, accompanied by Dad and a carton of milk.

9/10 (if the video playback had worked, it totally would've been a 10)