The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood
Living in a third hand Honda, the only mobility it provides further down the social ladder, things are not going well for Stan and Charmaine. He formerly in junior quality control in Dimple Robotics, she in entertainment and events in the local Ruby Slippers Retirement Home and Clinic, both lost their jobs in the global economic downturn, “trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheets like fog off a window.” If it was that easy, the fortunes could never have been real anyway.
Sleeping with one eye open in case they are attacked in the night and have to drive on and scrabbling to make ends meet, Charmaine has been able to find work in a downmarket bar where her friends suggest she could make extra cash if she joined them in turning tricks on the side while Stan’s only offer is to become involved in the dubious business of his estranged younger brother.
In desperate times even insane ideas might seem reasonable, even preferable to the prevailing circumstance, and so when a chance comes which seems too good to be true they apply to be accepted into the walled community of Consilience. The promise is full employment, housing and food; the catch is that it only covers six alternating months of the years. For the other six, they will be inmates of Positron Prison while those with whom they share their community step out of their cells to become wardens.
Like her recently completed MaddAddam trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last is not truly speculative fiction in that there are no great leaps of technology, only extrapolations of existing technologies and (bad) behaviours, and in too much of the world this is truth already, aging populations requiring care which for which there is no funding while rising youth unemployment creates instability, vandalism and violence.
Like she has done previously with The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham did in The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, this is nothing less than a new social order trampling over the old in the wake of an upheaval bordering on disaster, not with the hysteria of The Walking Dead or a similar doomsday apocalypse nor the “cosy catastrophe” of Wyndham where the downfall is discussed over a shared pot of tea but the realisation that the current construct is no longer sustainable as its inevitable collapse suddenly and precipitously accelerates.
With little choice, Stan and Charmaine agree to be bound by the rules of Consilience, one of the key tenets of which is that there is absolutely no contact with the anonymous “alternates” who occupy their houses when they are imprisoned. Constraining one set of behaviours only causes the urges of human nature to express themselves in other ways, and so Stan becomes obsessed with the unseen “Jasmine” who sleeps in their bed while they are away and the apparently chaste Charmaine indulges in extra-curricular assignations with “Max” where she adopts a persona wildly different from that she presents to her reliable but dull husband, liberating herself from the tedium of her life.
Such things will not go unnoticed, and the architect of their shame and downfall is the devious Jocelyn, a senior agent of Consilience’s Surveillance and a manipulative and calculating control freak, demanding ritual humiliations to further her power. Where Stan and Charmaine had thought Positron would be the burden in their new lives it turns out the relative freedom outside the prison is worse when the supposedly safe environment of their home becomes another kind of prison in Jocelyn’s toxic company.
Not so much an analysis of a relationship as a vivisection, sliced open and innards torn out, every hidden secret exposed, examined and discarded, while all the plot points are ticked off and the narrative neatly tied with a ribbon it is never compelling nor are the comedy elements convincing, the “prostibots” designed in the form of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe contrivances as artificial as their manufactured forms, the larger concerns of the collapsing world never touched upon once the facility is entered.
The prose is surprisingly bland, as though Atwood were satirising the low ambition of chick-lit (certainly eggs are a recurring theme, eaten at breakfast every day, Stan working at the chicken farm, an analogy drawn between the wall-within-a-wall of Consilience and Positron being akin to the yolk within the egg, the question unasked of which came first, the idea of profitable incarceration or the situation which would make it a thriving business) but it does not compare with the barbed black satire of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives nor Atwood’s own earlier works. Disappointingly, like Consilience itself, it is an interesting experiment which when closely examined is not entirely successful
The Heart Goes Last is available now from Bloomsbury
