Meet Atwood’s New Book, Same As Atwood’s Old Book

The Heart Goes Last explores a dystopian future strangely familiar to longtime fans

Margaret Atwood’s flare for conjuring up dystopian futures, based on the scarier aspects of our current world, has returned. Just a few years after the release of her last book, MaddAddam, she’s found a way to once again make readers question whether the worlds she creates could ever spill off the page and into reality.

The main characters of The Heart Goes Last, Stan and Charmaine, have lost their jobs, live in their old dingy car, have little to no money to support themselves, and occupy an area in which danger is constantly imminent. Salvation comes, however, in the form of a town called Positron/Consilience, where they are chosen to live after a mysterious presentation. There, Stan and Charmaine wonder if this is a paradise they’ve found themselves in, or some sort of bizarre limbo where their notions of infidelity, obsession, desire, disobedience and society must come into question.

Atwood is one of the few writers who can harness the flaws of society and incorporate them into a plotline, a story which is all-too-plausible to a modern reader. When the book was released on Sept. 29, it received mostly rave reviews, which seems to be something of a pattern for a majority of her work.

A review by The Guardian suggested that she “has put many younger writers to shame with her enthusiastic early adopting of new technologies.” Another review by The Globe and Mail stated that the book was “deeply witty and oddly beautiful.” Some reviews, of course, weren’t as ecstatic as others. The New York Times review mentioned that the plotline seems to “get lost in Itself,” and that the narrative “careens off the road, skids into the woods, hits its head, loses its memory and emerges as a strange quasi-sex romp concerned almost exclusively with erotic power, kinky impulses and the perversity of desire.”

Another point of interest is that this is her first standalone narrative since the release of her 2000 book The Blind Assassin. The Heart Goes Last is expected to do well in sales and garner Atwood possible rewards, both nationally and internationally. And if, by any chance, this book is adapted into a movie starring Anne Hathaway, make sure to get your ticket.