The Heart Goes Last by Margaret AtwoodMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don't know how to feel about this book. It's Margaret Atwood, so it is praise-worthy, but it is just so... weird, that I have mixed feelings about it.
In a dystopian future of high unemployment rates and violence, Charmaine and Stan are living in their car, dreaming of a better life that remains unattainable. That's till they come across the Consilience, a social experiment that lets them live happy, productive lives, with a roof over their heads - every other month. Every alternate month they are required to pack up their belongings and be holed up in a cell. During that time another couple take over their homes.
They put up with this life till some knowledge of the other couple leads to things falling apart. Suddenly, Charmaine and Stan are dragged into situations beyond their control. Throw in some crazy love potion experimentation, a shady brother and a fair amount of cheating, and this book is a heady mix of bizarro.
Atwood is a genius at building worlds and despite writing for so many years, she has not lost her touch. She is down with the tech of today and effortlessly uses up-to-date lingo and norms in the book. The chapters alternate between Charmaine and Stan, and it is primarily through them that the world is drawn out.
The brilliance of the book is how easy it is to read, and how poignant and frivolous it all seems. But it's hard to enjoy a book filled with so many conniving and cunning characters. She writes all of them as unlikeable - though, while Charmaine is probably the lesser liked of the characters, I thought Stan was an out-n-out rotter, always wanting more than he deserved or could have handled.
One thing that bothered me was that Atwood allows herself to write in a fair few tropes about women; they're not meant as cliches, just as regular aspects of women. Unfortunately, it grates on the modern reader as we just want all genders to be treated equally, and really want the women who appear 'different' to be represented more and more in popular media.
The other troubling thing is, for all intents and purposes, most of these characters are written as white - there's not much leeway for ambiguity. They're also all written as straight; in fact, there's not any mention of any same-sex couples, because the Consilience experiment doesn't account for couples who won't be apart during the prison stay, nor will be expected to be in separate gender-based workshops (that was another point that annoyed me, why expect that the women will only want to work in hospitals - though it's evident not all women only work there - and that men will be better at engineering? Surely, in 2016/17 we've moved past that?)
This is the kind of book you can zip through and get caught up in. You will walk away from it scratching your head, but hey, at least it keeps you thinking.
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