The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
by Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese, 2015
ISBN: 978-0385540353
322 p.p.
Atwood is an expert at digging through our inner thoughts and feelings and discovering what makes every person feel what they feel. She deftly writes about the differences between men and women and how we all treat one another. I was expecting another dystopian idea of the future with complex characters and complex thoughts, but instead The Heart Goes Last kept me wanting more. Instead of the deeply intricate characters that Atwood normally delivers, this book only offered characters with one single lightbulb on, and little else. What’s left is a strange depiction of the future as a place filled with sex robots, organ harvesting, and surveillance.
The book opens with the two main characters, Stan and Charmaine, living in their car. Times are desolate. The economy has collapsed and Stan and Charmaine, like the rest of the world, are fighting to survive. When Charmaine sees a commercial for the dual community of Positron and Consilience, she jumps at the chance to have a better life. There is, of course, a catch. This community works on the assumption that every inhabitant live a double-life. Half of their life is spent living a middle-class existence, while the other half is spent living and working in a prison. One month in, one month out. Oh, and once you sign yourself over to Positron, there is no going back; you are there for life. Charmaine jumps at the chance. Stan is skeptical, but he wants to make his wife happy, so he agrees.
The premise of the book is an interesting prediction of what the future could look like if a serious economic collapse occurred. A police state? Sure, that makes sense. Plus, the idea of citizens acting as both guards and prisoners is not out-of-the-question unbelievable. Where the book loses course, is with the characters themselves. They have no complexity. This is even more upsetting when paired with the fact that Atwood’s characters are normally quite layered. Charmaine is overly kind and a big believer in rules, and Stan is pessimistic and distrusting. As the story progresses, they both stick to their scripts.
Positron obviously has more secrets than originally let on, and Charmaine helps cover up these secrets. Stan, meanwhile, is oblivious to it all. Readers soon learn the disturbing reason behind the title and about so much more, but the book failed to keep me hooked throughout. It takes some complicated turns, but little else changes because the characters do not change. Every character has their vices and gets wrapped up in this complicated story.
The plot soon unravels and Stan and Charmaine are caught up in the scheme to overthrow Positron/ Consilience. Atwood holds onto her tell-tale dark humor throughout the novel, but she loses the plot when she gets caught up in who wants to have sex with whom. Soon, everyone is having an affair. The plot soon shifts from a story about totalitarian rule to a story about sexual escapades and who’s having them. Somewhere between the chicken fetishes and the sex robots, Atwood loses me. I can tell that she is trying to collect all of this into one premise: The heart goes last. Meaning, of course, that this act of love is helpless. Just like the act of desire, with love, you should not be able to control your impulses. Instead, the book just went down a path that I couldn’t follow. What started out as such an interesting premise for a novel ended up turning out to be just a convoluted science fiction story.
The Heart Goes Last was originally a collection of short stories on Byliner, and maybe that contributes to the reason why it goes so off-track. Either way, Atwood never bored me. I still found myself itching to read the book and her dark humor is undeniable. I just felt like she could have done more with such an interesting premise. This novel was just not memorable, especially when compared with her other books.
***
Margaret Atwood is a novelist of more than forty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction, but she is best known for her novels, which include, The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assasin which won the Man Booker Prize in 2000. She is also well known for The Maddam Trilogy which includes the Man Booker Prize nominated, Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009) and Maddam (2013). The Door (2007) is her most recent published volume of poetry. Her work has been published in more than 40 languages.
