"The Heart Goes Last,” by
Margaret Atwood
This is a book with so many angles
that it is not really clear what it is about.
The book starts with the United
States suffering dystopian conditions similar
to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” – the result of a huge financial collapse. People
have lost their jobs, live in cars, starve, work odd jobs like bars or
prostitution, fear theft and death. To
avoid this dreadful situation, the lead characters join a sinister ‘utopian’
solution to their poverty called the Positron Project. It is a confinement / prison community where
the residents spend 6 months in neat ‘50s bungalows working normal jobs and 6
months in jail raising chickens or knitting blue teddy bears. The 1950s is the touchstone for this world. It seems like Atwood is riffing on the
incarceration state that the U.S.
has become. It is the beginnings of a
good story.
 |
| Largest prison strike in history going on now - but not in this book. |
Then the secrets of the
comfortable prison are slowly revealed – housing and then murdering prisoners
for profit through organ-harvesting; kidnapping for baby-blood infusions; human
meat used for chicken feed; the manufacturing of sex robots and to top it off,
romantic ‘mind-surgery’ on unsuspecting women. The prison is like some kind of corporate
capitalist conglomerate trying every creepy profit angle - not just earning
money from the state to incarcerate criminals and the unemployed, which is
creepy enough. And absolutely
accurate.
Ultimately there is an
internal rebellion organized by some high-level insiders (not prisoners...) against the corporate
dictator, Ed, who runs the Positron Project.
The story ends by leaving the dystopia of lived-in cars and the poor
robbing and killing out of desperation. It
leaves the prison situation in which freedom and confinement are inextricably
mixed. It ends up in a ‘normal,’ somewhat
present-day Vegas – with wedding chapels, Elvis and Marilyn impersonators, even
the “Green Man” group - with no seeming connection to that past. As if Atwood lost interest in the earlier
story and had just paid a visit to the joke that is Las Vegas and wanted to use it for material. As somewhat of an odder coda, after the boss Ed
is exposed for his more nefarious doings and punished, the prison / bungalow enterprise
still continues - but ‘only’ to continue to produce sex-bots and collect money
from the state for incarceration. Like
normal, like the situation has improved!
The real story in this book seems
to be a somewhat unreal take on romance, love and sex. It seems to Atwood that all men primarily want
sex (somewhat like the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’) and so, indeed, do most
women. The story or themes are
window-dressing for an unconvincing story of ‘love’ by somewhat robotic
characters – or actual robots. The lead female is a conventional, air-headed
blonde married to a brooding but ‘solid’ conventional guy. She is actually attracted to another man in
the compound because her husband is dull, and adultery follows. The boss Ed
eventually becomes obsessed with her too and wants to turn her into his sex
slave through brain surgery on her.
Meanwhile her husband gets trapped into an adulterous relationship himself
while pining for another sexy woman he doesn’t know. Following this? Do you care?
So what we have here are
subjects previously touched on by “Cloud Atlas;” by “The Road;”
by “Frankenstein," even by any number of romance novels. The organ harvesting is especially
interesting, as this has been going on since the birth of capitalism and the
fact that it still plays a fictional (and real) role shows how little has changed. If there is a coherent point to “The Heart
Goes Last?” or even a coherent story within it, it escaped this writer. In spite of the prominent blurbs on the
back-jacket, and as much as I admire Atwood, the answer is no.
Reviews of “The Road,”
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Cloud Atlas” and "Monsters of the Market," below. Other dystopian books and films are also
reviewed. Use blog search box, upper left.
Red Frog
September 19, 2016
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