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