The use of pulp conventions in The Heart Goes Last undermines Atwood’s claim that speculative fiction is the antithesis of those cheesy, escapist fantasies about talking squids in outer space
By Cecilia Mancuso for Public Books, part of the Guardian Books Network.
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series”: a sequence of interconnected stories published gradually over the course of a year, which Atwood claimed was an attempt to revive a literary tradition of serialisation, popular from the halcyon days of Charles Dickens up through the 1950s.
First came the opening section, “I’m Starved for You”, originally a stand-alone story that sets up a dystopian premise promising to teach us a lesson: “When you surrender your civil liberties, you enter a funhouse of someone else’s making.” The world of the tale is the product of a devastating financial crash (think 2008, only bigger) in which “the whole card castle, the whole system fell to pieces, trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheets like fog on a window.” No one’s sure who to blame, but formerly middle-class couples like protagonists Stan and Charmaine are left unemployed, homeless, and on the run from roving gangs of criminals. While Charmaine earns minimum wage at the bar PixelDust, ever on the verge of resorting to prostitution, her husband Stan sulks, grudgingly relying on his ex-con younger brother Con (yes, really) for financial help.
Related: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood review – rewardingly strange
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