Follow the trajectory of any pressing modern concern and you'll land up in one of the fictional universes of a Margaret Atwood novel. Set in the near-future, somewhere in the American northeast, The Heart Goes Last posits an alternative reality for the good citizens of a chaotic, crime-ridden and poverty-stricken landscape. The laid-off live in their cars, earning just enough money for gas to high-tail it out of the parking lot they're sleeping in when marauding rapists attack. It's like a prologue to Mad Max.This is the sordid reality in which we find Stan and Charmaine as the book starts. They have been hit hard by the economic crash in what Atwood describes as "The Rustbelt" and don't have the ingenuity or the guts to turn to crime, or to set out into the unknown. Previously a programmer, making empathetic check-out robots, and an old age home entertainer respectively, Stan and Charmaine become seduced by a social experiment in which they're promised life-long security in exchange for relinquishing control of their lives.They sign up for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, where they're given jobs and a comfortable home.There are caveats: the residents take turns being prisoners - one month inside and one in the Pleasantville-style town. Once signed in they can never leave and communication with the outside world is forbidden.Every part of their existence is predetermined: their jobs, their associations, their environment, even their morality. Stan, whose prison job is managing the chicken coops, resigns himself to pimping his birds to sex-crazed inmates. Charmaine justifies her job as executioner (she slips needles into the necks of undesirables) by showing kindness to her victims in their final moments and by telling herself it's for the greater good of the community.The question at the heart of the book - are security and comfort worth giving up our free will for? - is addressed early on by Ed, Consilience's shadowy L Ron Hubbard-like leader, who says : ''You can't eat your so-called individual liberties, and the human spirit pays no bills."But human beings, no matter how malleable, are not robots and soon Stan and Charmaine are involved in raunchy and reckless affairs that take them on a journey involving blackmail, smuggling, kiddy sex-bots, identity theft and Elvis Presley impersonators. Despite switching sides to the team trying to expose the nefarious goings-on at Consilience, including human organ trafficking and laser surgery mind control, Stan and Charmaine remain as puppet-like and passive as ever, merely following a new set of commands.While Atwood swings the pendulum between power and subservience, liberty and totalitarian excess, sexual control and submission, the plot unravels in unnecessarily silly flourishes as if she were having too much fun and forgot herself.The book races to its conclusion with snappy demonic and absurd satire, but the fact that none of the characters is likable in the least makes it difficult to empathise with any of them and thus be drawn into the plot. By the time Charmaine is faced with the final question at the end of the book - ''Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" - her answer is already obvious. ''She wants the helplessness, she wants . the compulsion . Gun to head so to speak."And isn't that saying something quite disturbing about what our future holds?R328 from www.exclus1ves.co.za, Bloomsbury..