The world has ended many times, and in various ways, in post-apocalyptic fiction. Sometimes, it is the bomb; sometimes war catches up. In a few instances, rogue viruses and scientific experiments gone awry eat away at the fabric of society. Or English-speaking aliens invade. And everyone’s favourite has to be when the rich become richer and the poor become poorer and wary of anyone in clean clothes. In most instances, the dusty, ravaged world comes to rest upon the shoulders of an unlikely hero, who, with sheer dumb luck, manages to inspire some sort of valour in the people around him or her. Then comes the victorious end. The Heart Goes Last is a story about a more modest take on how humanity goes berserk.

Margaret Atwood has already guided us masterfully through a (literally) barren world in The Handmaid’s Tale, and through a purging of the human species in Oryx and Crake. In The Heart Goes Last, she presents a near future America where a national financial meltdown has affected millions of people.

Financial ruin has ended Stan and Charmaine’s middle-class lives and middlebrow ambitions. Living in a car, with few leftover possessions, the husband and wife survive on stale doughnuts, underwhelming banter and lots of self-loathing. They go from one parking lot to another, keeping the key in the ignition at all times to avoid scavengers and rapists. Hardly the ideal protagonists, Stan and Charmaine are unlikeable and, owing to Atwood’s sparse prose, you get a feeling that they themselves know it, too.

As the two stew in their misery, it is revealed that the only people making any sort of living in the destructed cities are the thugs, the drug runners and the miscreants. While Stan rankles at his uselessness, Charmaine manages to find employment. It is at her pitiful job at a bar that Charmaine finds out about Consilience: a wild and outlandish project inviting volunteers to participate in a social experiment within a controlled city. The rules are simple enough: one month in a Consilience-assigned home with a normal job according to your capabilities and one month in “Positron Prison”, a for-profit, retreat-like establishment where you are assigned other work. The catch is that you can’t have any communication with either the outside world or with the “alternates” who would be sharing the assigned home when you are at Positron.

Against good judgment, Stan and Charmaine sign up. A Stepford-like utopia reliving fifties’ pop culture, Consilience soon reveals itself to be an Orwellian dystopia where surveillance reigns supreme and the volunteers are no better than gerbils being used to further the cause of science — in this case, the cause of corporatisation of sex, slavery and, well, science.

The book oscillates between absurdity and sublimity. Charmaine, looking for change, embarks upon a wild sexual affair with the man who lives in her house as the couple’s alternate. Stan – seeking his own sexual escapades after finding a lipstick-stained note from Charmaine to her lover – is forced into sexual slavery by a dominating woman with a secret. In between, the story reveals cracks in the shiny veneer of Consilience. People not conforming to the Consilience way of life are culled. There is a project to make lifelike sex bots as well as sinister experiments to force people to develop sexual desire for those they may normally abhor. Madness simmers underneath a taut layer of assumed sobriety.

The plot seems to lull in the middle with Stan’s unending inner monologues about what he perceives Charmaine to be capable of, but the story overall survives. How the lead characters disengage with their sexual frenzy and realize they are in big trouble makes the book worth devouring.

There is a lot of sex in this book — not in the grim manner of The Handmaid’s Tale, but in a near comical way that is salacious and rather in-your-face, like those trashy paperbacks everyone denied reading as teenagers. And just like the vehement denials of our secret lowbrow literary misadventures, The Heart Goes Last feels like a wink to the mediocrity of human nature. When worst comes to pass, it seems to state, most of us will be slack-jawed, unwitting participants in the grand scheme of things, waiting for cleverer people to do something so we can inconspicuously ride their coat-tails to safety.