Claire Lowdon
‘A Meaningful Life’
The Heart Goes Last
By Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury 306pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction is in a dystopian decline. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), there is plenty to object to – the mangled prose, for starters. But at least that novel holds together as a diverting though implausible ‘what-if’, in which fundamentalism and soaring infertility rates force the protagonist, Offred, to become a handmaid – a breeder – for the Republic of Gilead, formerly the USA.
Three decades on, chaos reigns in Atwoodlandia. The Heart Goes Last began as a short story called ‘I’m Starved for You’
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