After watching The Handmaid's Tale TV series, I was excited to read another Margaret Atwood novel. I bought a hardcover, thinking this was a keeper. Unfortunately, I found this Just OK. By turns engaging, interesting, mysterious, turning mundane, disappointing, ridiculous, and then just relief it ended.
The premise is intriguing: in a world where crime and marauding gangs run rampant among the vast jobless, Stan and Charmaine decide to enrol in a new private company program where they would live in a comfortable house doing a decent job for six months of the year, then switch with another couple who work and live in prison. Advertised as a bold new social experiment, will this and other towns built all over the States be the answer to urban decay? Segregated in prison, they each begin to wonder about their 'alternates' - the couple who live in their house when they switch at the end of the cycle yet are meant to remain anonymous. As their lives intersect, they realize they are trapped by the corporation, she making teddy bears and he making computerized sex robots. From here the novel turns into a farce and then a mess, as Stan is forced to flee with damaging company data with help from a rebel underground who disguise him in a shipment of Elvis look-alike sex robots bound for Las Vegas. Elvis in his later years has become so synonymous with Las Vegas that to have Elvis robots, along with computerized Marilyn Monroe sex dolls, parachute into Sin City verges on camp - such an easy laugh that insults when you don't respect the source. I would have liked to explore the initial premise, but this quickly turned into a black comedy, without laughs or reality.
Logic goes out the window and we are left grasping at storylines to hold on to.
This started as a four episode series on a digital platform, and was then expanded into a novel. Perhaps that is why the story lurches from one idea to another. I was expecting more, and was disappointed. Looking back, I can't see the point she was trying to make, it was needlessly complicated in ways that didn't pay off.
I won't give it a Stinks, but for her ideas a Just OK.
Not recommended.
2015 / Hardcover / 306 pages
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