Serial form inspires Margaret Atwood's latest novel

Poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, entrepreneur, financial pundit, newspaper columnist and comic-book cartoonist, the Twitter-loving Atwood does not suffer fools gladly, therefore when you are questioning her you know you’re going to say something daft at some point. Which I do, of which more later. As someone once remarked, interviewing her is akin to sitting an exam – nonetheless, for me, it’s oddly pleasurable.

The purpose of this interview is to discuss the mighty Atwood’s much-anticipated new book, The Heart Goes Last, her first standalone novel since 2000’s Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin. It is not a soothing read, although a compelling and darkly comic one – serious and sinister, subtle and shrewd. Set in America in the near-future, against a backdrop of economic and social disaster, it tells of married couple Charmaine and Stan, homeless and living in their crumbling car while lawless gangs rape and pillage.

Offered jobs and a home, they sign up for the Positron Project. The catch is that they spend only every other month in their nice house which they share with their “Alternates”. The rest of the time they don orange boiler suits and become inmates in a massive and mysterious work prison.

There’s a lot of sex in The Heart Goes Last, some of it sadomasochistic and some involving elaborately realistic robots or “sexbots”. When I mention the amount of sex, Atwood asks drily: “Do you want me to apologise?” She adds that such sex dolls are currently in production in Japan. “They are making them so realistic they even have goosebumps on their skin and human body temperature.” Indeed, one of her three epigraphs quotes an article, “I Had Sex With Furniture”, from the Gizmodo technology website, which she urges me to read.

Atwood’s mocking, cool, sceptical voice is as powerful as ever in this novel. When I read her, I hear those drawling, sardonic, amused tones as if she were in on some secret cosmic joke. Perhaps she is, because there is no more scarily prescient writer, from the great dystopian fable The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which she’s currently turning into a graphic novel, to her MaddAddam trilogy and non-fiction book, Payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth, published in 2008 as the global economy went into meltdown.

Everyone thought she could see into the future. Which she’s said she “kind of did”. She’d been fascinated by subway advertisements for credit relief and payday loans companies. “I’m insatiably curious so I could see something was happening. I always want to know how things work.” Or don’t? “Exactly.”

With its many thought-provoking themes, including security versus freedom, government surveillance, artificial intelligence and the subjugation of women, The Heart Goes Last did not begin life as a novel (it’s her 15th). Between 2012-13, she wrote four stories, known collectively as Positron, for the Byliner literary website, which publishes long-form reads. She was, she says, “doing a Dickens, publishing in serial form”.

It was curiosity that led to her involvement with Byliner, because she always “tries everything”, hence the fact that she’s become the doyenne of digital. She’s co-written a zombie novel with Naomi Alderman on Wattpad and is currently changing the way writers interact with fans online through Fanado, to which would-be writers submit work anonymously for critiquing. She can not, though, she confesses, crack the Pin It button.

Her first story for Byliner, I’m Starved For You, had two results. “One was the reaction to it was so good that they said, ‘Why don’t you continue it?’ And there was almost immediate interest in turning it into a television series, but they needed more of the story so I wrote another three ‘episodes’; then I wrote the novel.”

And is the novel being adapted for TV? (The HBO TV series of her MaddAddam dystopian fable is “in process”, while the script has just been delivered for a six-part mini-series based on her historical fiction, Alias Grace.) “We do not talk about these things until the contract is signed,” she replies. “I can’t say who it is because these things sometimes fall through the cracks. Yes, I’ve met the person who wants to do it. That person is very good and really understands everything.

“Writing serially was great fun, a thrill-a-minute, but it was also a challenge, rather frightening and dangerous because you can’t see around the corner after the next one and you need cliff-hangers. It’s not only what happens but how it happens and to whom it happens. The serial really is an archaic form of storytelling. Nineteenth-century writers routinely published ‘numbers’. Dickens would make maybe three chapters of something, then put it out in pamphlet form. If the readers’ response was vigorous enough, then he would continue – that’s how Pickwick Papers got written. It was like daytime television written serially. Before you knew it, he had written a novel, but then Dickens was a really fast writer. I’m not that fast!

“If people liked a certain character they got a bigger part – Sam Weller was so popular with readers that Dickens gave him [a bigger part]. Conan Doyle wrote serially too; then he sends Sherlock Holmes over those Falls but readers demand his return. I don’t believe Conan Doyle wanted to kill off Holmes." She pauses for dramatic effect. “There was no body – that’s always a dead giveaway.”

Needless to say, with 864,000 followers on Twitter, Atwood was inundated with feedback. How did she respond? Did she change any characters? Did she kill anyone off? “No, I did not,” she replies. “But I took notice of the fact that everyone wanted more; then my editor suggested I write the novel.”

What inspired the storyline?

“I had been thinking a lot about prisons, following protests in Canada over the shutting down of prison farms,” she responds. (In 2009, the Conservative government announced the closure of operating farms at six prisons, one of Canada’s most successful prisoner rehabilitation programmes.) “What are prisons for? Are they to punish people, to rehabilitate them, to give them a fresh start? Are they to protect the public? In some cases, the answer to the latter is yes, but we also need to address those issues that drive people to commit crimes.”

Australia’s history as a penal colony also interested her. “With only men at first it was quite unruly so the idea was to settle them by sending them women. But there weren’t enough women in prison to meet the demand so they lowered the bar, criminalised more behaviour – yes, for stealing a crust of bread, say. They sentenced women more harshly to supply the demand. Today, we have for-profit prisons and they have to be kept supplied. It’s actually an incentive to create more criminals.”

Additionally, Atwood was much exercised by the Canadian government’s anti-terrorism act, giving unprecedented power to government, police and security services to share private information about individuals or groups seen as a threat to national security. “They’re going to spy on everything. They can wreck your life, if you’re targeted. It’s ridiculous.”

In May, Atwood was the first author to contribute to the Future Library, a conceptual project by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, which will publish an anthology of never-before-seen texts in 2114. Atwood’s story, Scribbler Moon, is “like Sleeping Beauty, because all the texts are being buried for 100 years in a Norwegian forest. Magical!”

Does she have faith in the future of print books and readers? “Ah well, the question is will there be any human beings left to receive them?” asks Atwood, who is currently voyaging to the Arctic, with her partner of 42 years, fellow writer, conservationist and “inspiration” Graeme Gibson, with whom she has a daughter, Jess (39). They will learn a lot from the geologist on board the ship, she promises, but she’ll also take her latest work in progress, about which she can reveal nothing.

Daft question alert: She never stops working then?

“Stop!” she exclaims, sounding black affronted. “Why would I stop writing? Writers never stop.”

Long may she continue.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood is published by Bloomsbury, £18.99. Atwood will be at Main Street Trading, St Boswells on September 23 (www.mainstreetbooks.co.uk/events) and Blackwells Bookshop’s Evening With Margaret Atwood at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh on September 24 (www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-margaret-atwood-tickets-17497478429)