The opening chapters of The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood's latest novel, are starkly familiar in the way that any admirer of The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake will be able to instantly recognise – they evoke that creeping sense that it would take just one door to open for our world to tumble headfirst into the world she has envisioned.
Atwood's own classification of her speculative fiction, as something that could conceivably happen in the future (as opposed to her definition of “science fiction” as something that could not happen) which has generated much debate and elicited criticism from science fiction fans, is a window into her approach to creating possible dystopias we could live or may already be living.
Her world-building takes a present “what if” to one of many possible conclusions; therefore, today's patriarchal world-order becomes the total enslavement of women in The Handmaid's Tale, and genetic engineering becomes a species-destroying virus in Oryx and Crake. The Heart Goes Last feels even more urgent, because its mise-en-scene is based on the 2008 financial crisis.
Consilience
The protagonists, husband-wife duo Stan and Charmaine, have been laid off from their jobs, have lost their home, and are living in their cars, narrowly escaping gang-rapists and vandals, and subsisting on stale donuts. Stan deals with it by being controlling and irascible with Charmaine, and Charmaine copes by working a bar job for a tiny income, and determinedly mouthing truisms sourced from memories of her grandmother.
Then, they find out about the city of Consilience, run by a corporation named The Positron Project, that promises them steady work and a home, provided they spend every alternate month in prison, and let another couple take their place during that time. Atwood's biting satire on the prison-industrial complex includes pitch perfect parodying of asinine corporate ad-slogans; Consilience is a portmanteau of the words “Cons” and “Resilience”, and the walled-off city's Orwellian motto is: “DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE.”
This invitation to Utopia, is, of course, a shove into a spiralling dystopia, one that is intimately concerned with favourite Atwood preoccupations – the gendered shaping of human relationships, the nexus between science and technology, capitalism, and dictatorships, and the tampering of the human consciousness to serve a totalitarian end. In all these senses, Atwood fans are in familiar territory.
Dislikeable people, virtuoso writing
What sets this novel apart, however, is the fact that it is a comedy – the kind of comedy, as Atwood has explained in interviews, that is perhaps amusing for the person watching, but not for the person going through it.
The bleakness of the story is undercut by how much Atwood is playing with her material here: raucous and often outrageous plot twists include Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators in Los Angeles, multiple convenient escapes from situations that seemed inescapable moments before, and the denouement, about which nothing can be said in this review without spoiling the end entirely.
The other really significant thing about this novel is just how dislikeable the characters are: Charmaine manages to be cutesy and banal at even the most horrifying parts of her story, and Stan spends roughly half his time being a raging misogynist and the other half utterly controlled by his gonads. The minor characters, too, don’t redeem themselves – everyone is compromised; even the one character who manages to save the day is complicit.
In the hands of a lesser writer, a story without anyone to root for would be unreadable, but Atwood’s storytelling is virtuoso, and I found the novel very difficult to put down.
Uncomfortable truths
The Heart Goes Last is most pleasurable in stray moments of deep wisdom which illuminate the chapters, which jolt the characters into awareness, and which are unmerciful about exploring the fickleness of desire, and the difficult business of negotiating free will. These moments are not always or even mostly uplifting.
One occurs when Stan, dressed as Elvis, asks himself, “Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture?” Another happens when Charmaine thinks about an evening ahead with a powerful man who desires her: “First they wheedle, but if you don’t do that thing they want, they get hurtful.” There are shameful moments – workers in a factory ignore sex dolls modelled after children, and the torture and killing of animals is mourned in the most cursory and insulting manner possible.
This is where the novel really succeeds: with all its capering, it is held together by Atwood’s gift of holding up a mirror with a steady hand.
The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood,
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Atwood's own classification of her speculative fiction, as something that could conceivably happen in the future (as opposed to her definition of “science fiction” as something that could not happen) which has generated much debate and elicited criticism from science fiction fans, is a window into her approach to creating possible dystopias we could live or may already be living.
Her world-building takes a present “what if” to one of many possible conclusions; therefore, today's patriarchal world-order becomes the total enslavement of women in The Handmaid's Tale, and genetic engineering becomes a species-destroying virus in Oryx and Crake. The Heart Goes Last feels even more urgent, because its mise-en-scene is based on the 2008 financial crisis.
Consilience
The protagonists, husband-wife duo Stan and Charmaine, have been laid off from their jobs, have lost their home, and are living in their cars, narrowly escaping gang-rapists and vandals, and subsisting on stale donuts. Stan deals with it by being controlling and irascible with Charmaine, and Charmaine copes by working a bar job for a tiny income, and determinedly mouthing truisms sourced from memories of her grandmother.
Then, they find out about the city of Consilience, run by a corporation named The Positron Project, that promises them steady work and a home, provided they spend every alternate month in prison, and let another couple take their place during that time. Atwood's biting satire on the prison-industrial complex includes pitch perfect parodying of asinine corporate ad-slogans; Consilience is a portmanteau of the words “Cons” and “Resilience”, and the walled-off city's Orwellian motto is: “DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE.”
This invitation to Utopia, is, of course, a shove into a spiralling dystopia, one that is intimately concerned with favourite Atwood preoccupations – the gendered shaping of human relationships, the nexus between science and technology, capitalism, and dictatorships, and the tampering of the human consciousness to serve a totalitarian end. In all these senses, Atwood fans are in familiar territory.
Dislikeable people, virtuoso writing
What sets this novel apart, however, is the fact that it is a comedy – the kind of comedy, as Atwood has explained in interviews, that is perhaps amusing for the person watching, but not for the person going through it.
The bleakness of the story is undercut by how much Atwood is playing with her material here: raucous and often outrageous plot twists include Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators in Los Angeles, multiple convenient escapes from situations that seemed inescapable moments before, and the denouement, about which nothing can be said in this review without spoiling the end entirely.
The other really significant thing about this novel is just how dislikeable the characters are: Charmaine manages to be cutesy and banal at even the most horrifying parts of her story, and Stan spends roughly half his time being a raging misogynist and the other half utterly controlled by his gonads. The minor characters, too, don’t redeem themselves – everyone is compromised; even the one character who manages to save the day is complicit.
In the hands of a lesser writer, a story without anyone to root for would be unreadable, but Atwood’s storytelling is virtuoso, and I found the novel very difficult to put down.
Uncomfortable truths
The Heart Goes Last is most pleasurable in stray moments of deep wisdom which illuminate the chapters, which jolt the characters into awareness, and which are unmerciful about exploring the fickleness of desire, and the difficult business of negotiating free will. These moments are not always or even mostly uplifting.
One occurs when Stan, dressed as Elvis, asks himself, “Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture?” Another happens when Charmaine thinks about an evening ahead with a powerful man who desires her: “First they wheedle, but if you don’t do that thing they want, they get hurtful.” There are shameful moments – workers in a factory ignore sex dolls modelled after children, and the torture and killing of animals is mourned in the most cursory and insulting manner possible.
This is where the novel really succeeds: with all its capering, it is held together by Atwood’s gift of holding up a mirror with a steady hand.
The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood,
