Book review: The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood

Author Margaret Atwood. Photo / Supplied

Meet Charmaine and Stan. She used to be a retirement home entertainer and he tested software that made self-scan checkouts seem more human. Now, after the financial crash, their married life together consists of "frantic, grit-in-the-eyes, rancid-armpit wandering". Menaced by bandits, they sleep in their car, scavenge food and sell blood to supplement the tips Charmaine earns at a bar where the main trade is sex and drugs.

So runs the set-up for Margaret Atwood's latest dystopia, set somewhere in the northeast of the United States. It's a predicament that doesn't seem all that far-fetched. Atwood points out, in passing, that Stan's brother, Conor, is a petty crook who also happens to have a roof over his head and a steady income (he thinks Stan is a "dupe of the system"). It highlights the vital premise of a plot that soon becomes harder to credit: we just need to know that Stan and Charmaine once played by the rules and lost, and now they'll try anything.

That's why they respond to an advertisement for something called the Positron Project, in the town of Consilience, which gives lucky applicants a job and a home. With caveats: not only do they have to swap occupancy every other month with an "Alternate" (someone just like them), they're obliged to spend the off-months in an on-site prison. Residents must carry out whatever tasks this corporation assigns - in Charmaine's case, administering lethal injections.

Not only are Stan and Charmaine desperate, they're too busy thinking about sex for any of their qualms to last long. Charmaine defies a ban on inter-Alternate communication to fall into the arms of Max; an invigorating but demeaning affair ensues. Stan fantasises about his own Alternate, Jasmine, after discovering her steamy note to a lover - no prizes for guessing who "Jasmine" really is.

Atwood's epigraphs - from Ovid, Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream) and technology blog Gizmodo - hint that her futuristic setting is a backdrop for age-old concerns about sex and desire. At first it seems that she has rigged up the stage simply for an Updikean drama of spouse swapping. But that's only where the action starts. The main part of the novel unfolds as a conspiracy yarn about how Positron and its sleazeball chief executive make their money. They might be lauded for solving the unemployment crisis - but why are they developing a range of sex-slave robots? And why are so many prisoners being put to death?

The novel switches between Stan and Charmaine in a close third-person narrative, fast-paced and full of fizzy demotic as they find themselves drawn into an organised resistance to their benefactors. Atwood often plays the story for laughs, even in its darker moments. "I don't think they'll ever replace the living and the breathing," someone says of the robots, or "prostibots". "They said that about ebooks," comes the reply. "You can't stop progress."

And once the action kicks in - chases, spying, double agents - we're hurled into blockbuster territory, where a lot of passages go like this: "There's a knock. What should he do? Nowhere to hide, so he might as well go down trying." Characters say, "We don't have long", and there are inevitable tranches of dialogue to explain the concepts behind the setting.

The Heart Goes Last began life as an online serial and it sometimes feels spun out. At the same time, the speed with which it moves doesn't leave much time to establish Stan and Charmaine as people Positron could snare: Atwood relies heavily on the idea that we're led by our groins to the point of losing our wits.

Overall, it's a strange fish: a sex comedy crossed with a stern satire on predatory big business in the shape of a knockabout action romp.

• The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury $36.99)