If there’s anything Canada’s expertly provocative Margaret Atwood can do better than just about every major writer of this century, it’s zeroing in on our most sensitive discomfort zones --- not just some of them, but pretty much all of them.

THE HEART GOES LAST, Atwood's newest literary assault on North American complacency and paranoia, checks all the emotional, sensual, spiritual and intellectual boxes where discomfort can reside. Even her gritty humor operates in ambush mode; you’re never quite ready for it. There are simply no protected arm’s-length angles from which to hover in some kind of sterile detachment as yet another of her future-world scenarios unfolds into an inscrutable, bittersweet conclusion.

Atwood’s surreal tale opens with Stan and Charmaine, a feckless but oddly likable young urban couple living in their decrepit car after being swallowed up in the tsunami of economic collapse. Their prospects seem hopeless, and their relationship hangs by a thread.

The timing of their situation --- job loss, mortgage default, bankruptcy, home abandonment --- is hideously apropos. There’s nothing futuristic about the social geography of THE HEART GOES LAST for countless Canadians and Americans left high and dry by the relentless erosion of once-solid manufacturing jobs, the oil-sector employment crash, the subprime mortgage scandal, and a steady decline of basic social services in both countries. The European Union is experiencing its own social and economic woes, exacerbated by a mass influx of refugees from genocidal civil warfare in places like Syria.

"THE HEART GOES LAST, Atwood's newest literary assault on North American complacency and paranoia, checks all the emotional, sensual, spiritual and intellectual boxes where discomfort can reside. Even her gritty humor operates in ambush mode; you’re never quite ready for it."

Into this pessimistic swamp of global calamities, Atwood parachutes one of her typically preposterous alternative society concepts. It’s the kind of thing fans have come to love and even expect of her --- the utopian ideal repositioned for our age, subtly twisted off-center, and then (not so subtly) turned on its butt end.

Charmaine and Stan learn of a town called Consilience, a brand new self-sustaining gated community built around a privatized former federal prison. The name means “convicts-plus-resilience” for reasons the couple discovers when they adopt its interesting lifestyle. Entry is rigorously controlled, but they apply on a desperate whim and are miraculously accepted.

The town’s chief “industry” is a complex and shadowy entity called the Positron Project. What it produces gets into rather squeamish and “spoiler” territory. Suffice it to say that Charmaine is one of those special individuals whose temperament is ideally suited to gently “relocating” imported criminals and other undesirables into the afterlife. She feels very fulfilled in her top-secret Medical Administration post, giving this essential service to the less fortunate. 

But that’s not all that goes on behind the weird science façade of the Positron scheme, whose publicity spin doctors are as well-oiled performers as any televangelist. Where there’s power, money and lust (usually working in combination), even the most precisely organized “perfect” society inevitably breaks down from within. The superficial prosperity of Consilience covers a growing web of dissent, and, of course, the semi-clueless Stan and Charmaine are quickly entangled.

As they are drawn into a chaotic and bizarrely funny (yes, funny!) existence of mixed messages, orchestrated deceptions, fake deaths and covert escapes, the pair are separated, challenged, exploited, betrayed and finally reunited. They begin a new life in a better version of the “outside” than they came in with. They start a family. They remain (more or less) the same people after their grand adventure in Consilience. Or do they?

The ending of THE HEART GOES LAST is eerily telling. Assured by a former Positron bigwig that they are indeed free of obligations to anyone and anything, and can live their lives as they wish, Charmaine asks vacantly, “How do you mean?” 

Indeed. Once again, the truly iconic Margaret Atwood has kept us eagerly uncomfortable from beginning to end.