The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood (2009)

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

As I succumbed to some kind of (now possibly viral) chesty bug, the second book of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy kept me wonderful company. A slightly chunkier book than I often read (this isn’t altogether intentional I just seem drawn to shorter books) The Year of the Flood was such a wonderfully intelligent, imaginative read, that it really did become hard to put down.

The narrative of this book runs parallel to that of Oryx and Crake – in year twenty-five, a catastrophic event has effectively wiped out the vast majority of the population on earth. Strange, savage hybrid creatures wander the desolate landscape as an unforgiving sun beats down on the few fragile human beings left, and vultures hover overhead. Who, if anyone, is left alive?

“Why can’t I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. “You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins,” she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”

As with Oryx and Crake, the narrative moves back and forth between the last decade or so before year twenty-five, to the days and weeks following the man-made plague that wiped out most of the human population. In Oryx and Crake, we met Snowman (aka Jimmy), and the strange children of Crake – but by the end of that book we know that Snowman isn’t alone after all.

Surviving the “waterless flood” are two women Toby and Ren. Against the odds the two women survive separately, each isolated and alone. Ren living, at first, in an airtight room at the upmarket sex club where she had worked as a dancer, using the media devices she has access to, to search for news of her friend Amanda. Toby, at the Spa where she had been hiding out. Now Toby; some years older than Ren, watches from the roof top garden that was her home for several years.

In the years before, Toby had found refuge with the God’s Gardeners, a religious cult, who refuse to eat flesh and utilise the products of the natural world in their clothing, medicines and food. Toby has spent years hiding from a violent, stalker, and with the gardeners she finds a way of life she only partly believes in, but for some years brings her peace. Toby had become a bee keeper, maker of potions and in time became a key member of the community. Now she scans the horizon from the ruined rooftop garden, clutching a rifle she has dug up from her parents’ old home.

“Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenaline, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

In the past Ren had also lived with the gardeners, as a child she had been taken there when her mother left her father and took up with Zeb another key figure in the gardeners. Ren’s mother eventually takes them back to one of the privileged compounds, a sanitised world of scientific breakthroughs and man-made everything. Here, as a teenager Ren meets Jimmy, who breaks her heart, bitter and hurt, rejected by her selfish mother, Ren stumbles inexorably toward the sex industry.

Ren is brought up against other ragged survivors, many of whom are horribly dangerous, and one of whom is Toby’s old nemesis. Ren is tough, but she needs help. Ren and Toby come together, they will need all their strength and ingenuity to survive the hostile environment that they are now living in.

I must admit that Toby’s story was my favourite of the two, the life she lived with the gardeners, one I almost started to envy. She learns the way of plants and how to talk to bees – she’s a survivor and someone I would want on my side.

I don’t really want to say too much more about the plot of this one, but oh my what an imagination. Nothing is so far fetched that it isn’t immediately credible, although let’s hope not prophetic. Though Margaret Atwood has a talent I think for seeing where it is that humanity is going wrong and calling us out on it. She does so brilliantly here, and I can’t wait for book three.

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Dancing Girls – Margaret Atwood (1977)

My second read for Karen and Simon’s 1977 club was Margaret Atwood’s The Dancing Girls, a collection of short stories. It was only after finishing the collection, and quite by chance that I discovered the list of fourteen stories in the book changes very slightly between two editions. In the original 1977 edition the stories; War in the Bathroom and Rape Fantasies are included – which for the 1982 edition are changed for Betty and The Sin Eater. My Virago edition has this later selection of stories – I can’t help but wonder at the change – although I am pleased at the inclusion of Betty as it was one of my favourite stories in this collection.

I have thoroughly enjoyed short story collections by Margaret Atwood before – many years ago reading Bluebeard’s Egg – very pre-blog and more recently Stone Mattress and Wilderness Tips. Several of these stories really do stand out and are every bit as excellent as I have come to expect – however some of the others didn’t work quite as well for me. Overall, I liked the collection but didn’t love it.

The men and women in these stories are frequently unable to communicate with one another – they are often separate themselves either physically or mentally. These stories explore the complicated relationships between men and women.

In the opening story; The man from Mars an awkward, slightly overweight student finds herself pursued by a foreign student from an unnamed Eastern country. Christine – living in the shadow of her more glamorous mother and sisters, is unused to such attention. So, when a short, bespectacled oriental looking man begins to follow her around after having once stopped her to ask directions she really doesn’t know what to think. The student is horribly persistent, but also rather pathetic. His attentions are perplexing, and irritating, but he doesn’t seem dangerous. Nevertheless, eventually the police are involved. It is a wonderful story to kick off the collection, there is a deliciously wry humour in the description of Christine’s faithful pursuer – and of a strained little tea party, Christine’s clueless mother insists she has for a man who might turn out to be boyfriend material.

“As the weekdays passed and he showed no signs of letting up, she began to jog-trot between classes, finally to run. He was tireless, and had an amazing wind for one who smoked so heavily: he would speed along behind her, keeping the distance between them the same, as though he were a pull-toy attached to her by a string. She was aware of the ridiculous spectacle they must make, galloping across campus, something out of a cartoon short, a lumbering elephant stampeded by a smiling, emaciated mouse, both of them locked in the classic pattern of comic pursuit and flight.”
(The man from Mars)

Betty – one of those two stories added to this collection in place of others – is the second story in the collection. The story narrator looks back to a time when she was growing up – remembering the neighbours Betty and her husband Fred who she met when her family rented a small cottage for the summer between house moves. Betty hadn’t interested her young neighbour when she was a child – instead it was Fred who absorbed all her interest and fantasies.

“It seemed as if we had lived in the cottage for a long time, though it was only one summer. By August I could hardly remember the apartment in Ottawa and the man who used to beat his wife. That had happened in a remote life, and, despite the sunshine, the water and the open space, a happier one. Before our frequent moves and the insecurities of new schools had forced my sister to value me.”
(Betty)

Now, as an adult looking back on that time, she realises she can no longer remember Fred’s face – though she remembers Betty with great clarity. She remembers how Betty changed after Fred betrayed her – how over the years Betty kept in touch, and the family watched as she re-invented herself yet remained much more of a mystery than Fred ever was.

That foreign ‘otherness’ that is explored in the opening story is present again in the title story Dancing Girls. Set in a boarding house, where Ann and her landlady – wonder about the new man – who has what the landlady calls a native costume in which she politely asks him to appear from time to time. We witness the clash of cultures again, although I felt the story petered out a bit at the end.

Other stories which grabbed me were: When it happens; in which we see a woman who remembers well living through the Second World War is preparing for what she thinks is the end of the world – or some kind of cataclysmic event that will bring almost everything to an end. The Resplendent Quetzal is another superb story – in which the broken relationship of a married couple on a bird watching holiday is beautifully explored. In Hair Jewellery we meet a woman who loves someone who never really returns her feelings. She has romanticised their future break up – which when it comes is nothing like her fantasy – eventually she finds she can never quite leave him behind.

I enjoy Margaret Atwood’s writing – and there is certainly a lot to enjoy in this collection, those stories which I was less keen on stop short of actually being disappointing – they just didn’t grab me.

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Wilderness Tips – Margaret Atwood (1992)

Having so loved reading the brilliant Oryx and Crake at the start of the month for the Librarything Virago’s group author of the month – I was keen to read more Atwood. I chose this story collection, which somehow, I hadn’t even heard of until quite recently.

Wilderness Tips contains ten superbly crafted stories, in which life doesn’t always turn out quite how it was expected to, consequences must be faced, time flies as it does in life. All of this within the confines of ordinary life. I’m not going to describe in detail every story – as ten is rather a lot to write about – so I shall instead attempt to give a flavour of the collection.

The stories – some of which span years, even decades – focus mainly on the lives of women, and the men who inhabit their lives. Toronto, its environs and the Canadian woods are the settings for these stories – some taking place in slightly more rural settings – two of the stories taking in the world of the summer camp. I have always known, that had I been born in Canada or the US I would have simply despised the summer camp. Yet just as the world of the hotel or the boarding school is deeply fascinating and wreathed in stories as they are places that pull unrelated people together – so is the North American summer camp similarly fascinating. I wonder if that explains the fact that these two stories, True Trash and Death by Landscape were among my favourites.

True Trash is the story which opens the collection, and a group of young boys with some binoculars spy on a group of waitresses as they sunbathe. The waitresses – subject to much speculation and fantasy – are only three or four years older than the boys – lie in the sun and read romance stories in trashy magazines. Here Atwood recreates the atmosphere of the camp beautifully, the sexual tensions between the boys and these older girls, that heady, complicated time when one is somehow stranded between childhood and adulthood. The story of the consequences of that summer continue many years later – but I naturally can’t say too much about that.

“Between two oval hills of pink granite there’s a small crescent of beach. The boys, wearing their bathing suits (as they never do on canoe trips but only around the camp where they might be seen by girls), are doing their laundry, standing up to their knees and swabbing their wet T-shirts and underpants with yellow bars of Sunlight soap. This only happens when they run out of clothes, or when the stench of dirty socks in the cabin becomes too overpowering. Darce, the counsellor is supervising, stretched out on a rock, taking the sun on his already tanned torso and smoking a fag. It’s forbidden to smoke in front of the campers but he knows this bunch won’t tell. To be on the safe side he’s furtive it, holding the cigarette down close to the rock and sneaking quick puffs.”

(True Trash)

The second camp story – actually the fifth story in, Death by Landscape – in which a woman recalls a mysterious and shocking incident at her summer camp years before. Atwood’s description of a traditional old camp, little changed since the start of the century, and the remote, mountainous countryside surrounding it is perfect. In her apartment, where she now lives alone, Lois has a collection of landscape paintings, which take her back to the world of that camp.

“She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them. Although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.”

(Death by Landscape)

Several of the women in these stories are professional women – journalists or lawyers -making their way in the world of men. In Hairball, for instance, Kat, a magazine editor, undergoes surgery to remove a growth – there’s a horrifying description of it – which I shall spare you. Kat takes her tumour home in a bottle of formaldehyde. Kat’s married lover; Gerald – takes the opportunity of her absence from work to ease her out – a betrayal which takes her breath away. Kat takes a terrible, stomach churning revenge. It is a quite brilliant story, slightly disturbing, but with a superb sting in the tail. In Uncles; Susanna, a journalist has her success ruined by the poisonous jealously of a male colleague – the uncles of the title the men whose praise and approval she worked so hard to achieve when she was a girl. The uncles had protected and provided for Susanna and her mother, and Susana can’t help but search for uncle like figures as she starts out in her career. In Weight, another professional woman – a lawyer sleeps around, seeming always to be making omelettes for other women’s husbands. She remembers Molly – who she was at college with – they shared similar dreams of fighting feminism and achieving professional greatness. Now our narrator, engineers a meeting with a rich man – she is only interested in his money – though it isn’t for herself she wants it – but for a shelter for battered women – to be called Molly’s Place.

In the title story Wilderness Tips, we witness the strange dynamic between three sisters. George, once a Hungarian refugee – has been successful in Canada and married one of the sisters. George has cheated on his wife with one of her sisters – and is now dancing around the third – quite successful in this too it seems. George’s past very different to his present – which he can’t help but recall as his wife Prue shows of the effect of her red bandannas.

“‘It’s the forties look,” she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. “Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?”
George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they’d found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.”

(wilderness Tips)

Wilderness Tips is a wonderful collection which beautifully explores aspects of Canadian life, between the sixties and the nineties.

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Oryx & Crake – Margaret Atwood (2003)

I was rather delighted when the librarything virago group, elected to read Margaret Atwood books during November. I recently read Stone Mattress a collection of superb stories that really put me in the mood for more Atwood.

I chose to read Oryx & Crake a work of dystopian, speculative fiction which imagines a world as it could so easily be given the right conditions. It is both a brilliant and terrifying vision, and possibly one that only works when it comes from the razor like imagination of Margaret Atwood.

“He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.”

We are introduced to Snowman; a post-apocalyptic character living in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, alone in a strangely altered world. Nearby are a band of human-like creatures – who Snowman calls Crakes, – the children of Crake, who have developed their own rites and rituals and bring Snowman a fish once a week. The Crakers view Snowman as a teacher – looking to him for guidance and explanation for the things they don’t understand. Snowman is nearing starvation – the supplies he had previously provided himself with are running out – and he desperately needs to replenish them.

“Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards.”

Through a series of flashbacks, we see Snowman’s past, when he was Jimmy, and before the population had been seemingly wiped out. Jimmy had grown up in the privileged world of the scientific communities living inside enormous compounds. Outside these compounds – are the pleeblands – a chaotic, unregulated world where poverty and viruses run rife. When he is in high school Jimmy meets Glenn – and the two become good friends, playing online games and watching dodgy underground videos. Glenn’s online persona is Crake – a name which sticks, and it is while the boys are watching online videos that they first see the arresting face of Oryx in a piece of child pornography. We see clearly that Crake is ambitious, and he has some big ideas. Jimmy is still coping with the desertion of his mother, who left the compounds for the pleeblands – ensuring that Jimmy is always in the sights of the authorities, who call him in for questioning every now and then.

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

Ruminating on the past, his mother, his friendship with Crake– Snowman – as he is in the present – decides to take a perilous trip to the abandoned compound where he once lived in great comfort. He recalls the stories Oryx finally told him about her mysterious life which so disturbed him, including stories of sex trafficking. Wrapped in his old sheet to protect him from the cruelty of the sun – Snowman sets out for the compound, sheltering from the sun during the worst part of the day. The compound is not a nice place anymore – most of the supplies are long used up anyway – and retrieving whatever might be left means running a gauntlet of ferocious hybrid animals that now run wild, and picking his way through the remains of people who died when the plague-like catastrophe struck. The memory of Crake and all he said, has stayed with Snowman – as he recalls how Crake ended up working in one of the top compounds, involved in some pretty cutting-edge stuff. While Jimmy went to an inferior compound. Until, Crake stepped in, taking his old friend to work with him on a very special programme.

“We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It’s not good for you.”

In flashback we learn eventually how and why the world has changed so frighteningly – though I think most readers will have worked at least part of that out by the time they get there. We learn why Snowman is haunted by the memory and the voice of Oryx, feeling his most terrible solitude as he struggles to survive. As the novel ends we discover that Snowman might not be quite so alone after all. This of course sets things up nicely for the second book in the MaddAddam trilogy – Year of the Flood – in which events run parallel to Oryx & Crake.

Oryx and Crake is a stunning novel – thought provoking and utterly compelling and I pretty much gulped it down as fast as I could.

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Stone Mattress nine wicked tales- Margaret Atwood (2014)

I love short stories, but I hadn’t read any Margaret Atwood short stories since I read Bluebeard’s Egg at least twenty-five years ago. I also hadn’t realised that there were a few collections out there that I could have been reading. At the same time that I bought this collection, I bought Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel Hag-seed – and was really debating which to read first. I am so glad I chose this collection because it so completely captivated me – and made me realise I really haven’t read enough Atwood the last few years. My re-read of The Handmaid’s Tale  a few months ago was immensely positive of course – but something about The Heart Goes Last didn’t completely work for me (I’m sure it’s just me) – so to be so blown away by another Atwood book felt quite exciting.

Stone Mattress nine wicked tales is highly addictive, sharply observed and brilliantly imagined, I gobbled them up in two days. These are the sort of stories I don’t want to say too much about – you will all just have to read them.

The first three stories; Alphinland, Revenant and Dark Lady are connected, Atwood considers matters of ageing in the stories of a group of people who first knew each other back in the 1960s.

“The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice. In the streetlights it looks so beautiful, like fairy silver, thinks Constance. But then, she would think that; she’s far too prone to enchantment.”

We begin with Constance, in Alphinland – a renowned fantasy writer – who created the fictional world of Alphinland many, many years earlier while she lived with Gavin an aspiring, serious poet. Now she is an old woman, mourning her husband in the midst of an ice storm, trying to look after herself the best she can, she still talks to her husband Ewan, it keeps him close. Constance makes a hazardous journey to the nearby shop, scatters cat litter on the steps outside – all the time remembering Gavin, who cheated on her with Marjorie, and laughed at her work. Constance was probably my favourite character in the whole book.

In Revenant we meet Gavin, a pretentious, revered poet, now living with his third wife Reynold, thirty years his junior. He remembers Constance as the one that got away, about who he wrote some of his best-known poems. Gavin; pretending great nonchalance – thrives on a bit of attention, so is ready to really enjoy himself when a student turns up to interview him.

“Why couldn’t the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he’s here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.”

In Dark Lady, Constance, Marjorie and Reynolds are reunited at Gavin’s funeral. There are of course truths to be told, and memories of the past re-examined. Atwood’s depiction of the funeral, with its folk singers and poetry is pure gold.

The stories in this collection vary in length, but they have a delicate, dark heart. Lusus Naturae is the shortest, a modern take on the vampire stories of the past, innocence and superstition and misunderstanding clash, leading to an inevitable conclusion.

“Now I was dead, I was freer. No one but my mother wa allowed into my room, my former room as they called it. They told the neighbours they were keepimg it as a shrine to my memory. They hung a picture of me on the door, a picture made when I still looked human. I didn’t know what I looked like now, I avoided mirrors.”

The Freeze-dried groom, is darkly humorous – and if you ever watch that TV programme from the US; Storage Wars (I can’t say I have ever understood the appeal)– you will never look at those storage units in the same light. A man who the reader has reason to distrust for other reasons, buys several container units – and is quite unprepared for what he finds inside.

I dream of Zenia with the bright red teeth reintroduces us to Charis, Ros and Tony from The Robber Bride – a book I know I enjoyed very much, but I’m embarrassed to admit I can remember nothing about – though it is a while since I read it.

We meet another writer in The dead hand loves you, a man who years earlier, as a young, penniless student, wrote a horror story which became a huge bestseller – now considered a gothic classic. However, the writer entered into a profit sharing deal at the time with his three housemates, a deal he has had cause to regret for years.

The title story of the collection; Stone mattress was one of my favourites, it concerns an act of terrible (but rather perfect) revenge, when a woman meets the man who raped in in high school – on an arctic cruise.

The premise of Torching the dusties is rather disturbing – nursing homes find themselves under siege as society outside starts to break down. An elderly couple, one a woman with Charles Bonnet syndrome, come together to do all they can to survive.

Throughout this collection Margaret Atwood’s writing is simply wonderful, gorgeous description, dark humour and complex characters explored with feeling.

A few days after finishing this amazing collection of short stories, the BBC broadcast a wonderful programme in which Alan Yentob talks to Margaret Atwood – it was an extraordinarily lovely programme which I have recorded to keep and watch again. It certainly made me want to read the books of Margaret Atwood that I haven’t managed to get around to (perhaps not the Maddaddam trilogy as I am not great with Sci-fi – those who know better tell me if I am wrong), and re-read all those I read twenty five/thirty years ago. I still have Hag-Seed to read and have now ordered Wilderness Tips.

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The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1985)

I feel as if this is a book everyone has read – that in itself makes me nervous – reviewing a book that is so loved, so iconic and so well-known. I feel as if I don’t need to write a long re-hash of the plot – though in the unlikely event that there is someone who hasn’t read this book I will attempt to give a spoiler free taste of it.

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale somewhere between 1987 and the early 1990s. My Virago edition dates from 1987, and I feel like I have always had this book in my possession – and hard though it might be to believe, I didn’t have an absurd tbr back then, so it stands to reason I would have read it around the time I bought it. I had wanted to re-read it for a while, so when my very small book group chose to read it, I was delighted. Certain books stay with us– on some level at least, no matter how many books come after. When I read The Handmaid’s Tale all those years ago I was quite young, and the story horrified and haunted me – I loved the novel and was devastated by it at the same time. Dystopian fiction worried me, I was at an impressionable age during those latter years of Thatcher’s Britain. A few years earlier when I was still at school I had had a similar reaction to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (I left school in 1984 aged sixteen, I had read the book in the early 80s and convinced myself it would all come true). This time I flew through the novel in two days, breathless with admiration, it really is the most astonishingly brilliant, and deeply affecting novel – and still feels frighteningly relevant.

Margaret Atwood takes us to a terrifying, near future, the former United States, now called Gilead, a war is being fought, disease and pollution has had a drastic effect on fertility. The entire government have been assassinated and replaced by a new social order, a totalitarian theocracy intent on ensuring the continuation of the population. Atwood’s depiction of this society – with its rules and punishments is absolutely breath-taking, it reads as a warning. A strongly feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Tale explores the subjugation of women in an unforgettable way.

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”

Offred is our narrator a thirty-three-year-old woman, forced to live as a handmaiden in the home of a high-ranking commander and his wife – her task; – taken from a literal interpretation of the Old Testament – is to breed for them. Offred (literally of-Fred, the commander’s first name is Fred) having found to be fertile, having had a child in the time before – was forcibly taken to the Red Centre, where she was prepared and instructed in the ways of her new life, that of a handmaid. Here she meets Moira – a friend from the time before.

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”

In flashback, we get a glimpse of the time before – Offred as she is now called -knows her former name to be forbidden. She had a partner – Luke, a daughter, friends, had enjoyed a college education a job, a good life. Flight across the border to Canada was attempted and violently stopped. There is the sense of life continuing perhaps fairly normally in the outside world.

The society of Gilead is a strictly hierarchical one, all women are categorised – having a set role they must live by. The Aunts control the handmaids, the Marthas work as household servants, wives naturally enough are the women who enjoy the greatest social standing, while Econowives are married to lower ranking men, and do not enjoy the prestige of the wives, jezebels are those women forced to work as prostitutes while unwomen are those who are sterile, widows, gay or have been politically resistant to the new order. All handmaids are placed in a commander’s home for two years, if they fail (always their fault) they will be moved to another household – their name changing with each placement. Infertility is high, but the handmaids must conceive – and bring a healthy child into the world, these are rare enough events, but each handmaid is desperate to be successful. Too many failures will mean banishment to the colonies – toxic waste, near starvation and certain death. Sex is conducted within ‘the ceremony’ an act of hideous humiliation for both handmaid and wife (shudder!).

Women’s lives in this society are strictly controlled – they are no longer permitted to own property, have money, read, vote, make any decisions for themselves. The time before is rarely referred to, and in this new society women are pitted against each other. Econowives and Marthas dislike the handmaids seeing them as sluts – and the handmaids have little chance of forming friendships – as the Eyes are everywhere and the punishments for straying outside the rules frightening indeed.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot – so many people seem to be reading this classic novel at the moment. Then of course there is the new TV series – in which Margaret Atwood makes a cameo appearance, and is one of the producers. I made a remark on Twitter about Offred’s before name being revealed in the first episode – and Margaret Atwood herself replied – oops – apparently this was implied in the book and I missed it (oops) and this name was chosen by readers. I hadn’t known that obviously. So, who feels silly now? I do. Anyway, my book group friends and I are going to have so much to talk about – I can’t wait.

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The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood (2015)

Now I know I am not known for reading piles of recently published fiction, (despite 3 new books in a row) and neither am I known for reading much dystopian fiction – I have read it occasionally though. So it might at first glance appear that I am not the most reliable reviewer of a novel like The Heart Goes Last. However I do actually quite like dystopian fiction though I read very little of it – and I do appreciate great writing, and Margaret Atwood is generally regarded as a very great writer. I finished this book almost a week ago – and have only just sat down to write my review because I think I felt a bit uncomfortable about it.

Before I began reading The Heart Goes Last, I expected to absolutely love it – I thought it would be a fantastic novel, and so I dived in, only a couple of weeks after buying the book. I had naturally avoided reading any reviews before I got stuck in. As I read The Heart Goes Last – I found myself switching moods fairly often, sometimes I really liked what I was reading, I was fascinated by the premise and the Dystopian world that Atwood has created – which in the first third of the book felt pretty believable. Suddenly I would find myself irritated – parts of the story were just a bit nuts – I think I fell into that trap of thinking ‘Oh well it must be really good because Margaret Atwood wrote it.’ Having since had time to think about the book as a whole – I have decided it actually isn’t all that good really. Ultimately the book doesn’t really go anywhere – and now I have scanned few reviews on Goodreads – which seem very mixed – so I don’t think I am alone. I didn’t hate it, (goodreads 3 star rating) I really liked the first third and I couldn’t help but find it quite compelling – just ultimately unsatisfying.

“Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?”

Atwood’s world in this novel is at first a perfectly recognisable one, a world which following a social and economic crisis has become a very difficult place to live in for many people. Stan and Charmaine, a married couple in their thirties like many other people – have found themselves homeless, Stan is unemployed, and the couple are living in their car existing on the pittance that Charmaine brings back from the grotty bar where she has some work. Their position within the broken society that now exists is a precarious one, prey to the vicious gangs that roam the streets looking for victims. So when Charmaine sees an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience it appears to be the answer to their prayers. The Positron Project promises safety, a beautiful comfortable home, jobs and a good life. In return for this suburban paradise all they will have to do is to swap their home for a prison cell every second month. One month they will live in the town, doing the jobs they are assigned, the next month their ‘alternatives’ will take their place in the house and do the jobs while Charmaine and Stan spend the time in Prison. Here they are also assigned jobs.

“The hedge doesn’t need trimming – it’s the first of January, it’s winter, despite the lack of snow – but he finds the activity calming for the same reasons nail biting is calming: it’s repetitive, it imitates meaningful activity, and it’s violent. The hedge trimmer emits a menacing whine, like a wasp’s nest. The sound gives him an illusion of power that dulls his sense of panic. Panic of a rat in a cage, with ample food and drink and even sex, though with no way out and the suspicion that it’s part of an experiment that is sure to be painful.”

Those in charge of the project claim their project will solve the housing and employment situation beautifully. Inside the town of Consilience living under the Positron Project, life is fairly perfect – or so it seems. Everyone is happy, they have beautiful comfortable homes, jobs to which they are perfectly suited, lovely food, bathrooms stocked with thick fluffy towels, and you turn on the radio and the cosy, dulcet tones of Doris Day come out. In prison, there are knitting circles and work that will benefit the whole of the town to get stuck into. The town has been based around a fifties ideal – which is very well done, and even helps to add to the chilling nature of the story – there is something comforting about the fifties we often think – but not here.

“The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread.”

Of course there is the problem of the real criminals to be dealt with as the project gets underway – but of course someone has thought of that. It quickly becomes apparent that not everything in Positron is idyllic. After a little while, Stan and Charmaine each develop a passionate obsession about their ‘Alternative’ who occupies the house when they are in prison. It is this that leads to all sorts of trouble. It is forbidden to interact with their ‘Alternatives’ who in theory they should never meet anyway – the one day when it is possible being ‘switch over day.’ Sexual desire, guilt and misery in a plot that I have seen described as dark and wickedly funny. Well yes it is darkly comic in places, but possibly not wickedly funny, and there were moments that become just rather too bizarre. Living sex dolls, troops of created Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe ‘dolls’ on the loose in Las Vegas! It got a little too unbelievable really – and then didn’t really go anywhere – I suspect there will be a Positron book 2 – I’m not sure if I will bother though if there is. The one thing Atwood does do really well in The Heart Goes Last is to evoke the atmosphere of living within a deeply sinister environment.

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