The Heart Goes Last

by Margaret Atwood

"Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in...for six months out of the year."--

• ISBN10: 0385540353
• ISBN13: 9780385540353
• Publish Date: 29 September 2015 (first published 24 September 2015)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Imprint: Nan A. Talese
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

The theme of prison runs through much of Margaret Atwood's work, whether we're talking about literal prison (Bodily Harm, Alias Grace, Hag-Seed), another form of physical imprisonment (The Handmaid's Tale), or mental imprisonment (by the past as in Cat's Eye, in a bad marriage as in The Blind Assassin, by patriarchy as in... well, all her books, really, but Edible Woman is a good more metaphorical example). Here's a speculative look at a new form of late capitalism that has adopted the prison industrial system as a model for society in general. It's an interesting concept, but I found it tedious and shallow. I have to disclose my personal bias that I think Atwood is by far at her best when she's writing about the real world (Cat's Eye is one of my favourite books of all time!), so this was probably never going to be my favourite, anyway.

I actually find Atwood's speculative concepts well-developed and relevant to the real world. The extreme convergence of fundamental Christianity and patriarchy in The Handmaid's Tale has only become more convincing with time; the version of environmentally-ruinous late capitalism she envisions in the MaddAddam series is essentially plausible. The adoption of a prison-like model in a near-future American context also makes sense, as does the extreme version of modern capitalism presented. I guess I just wanted this to go further in its critique of the prison industrial system, when in the end it felt more like an interpersonal drama with a resolution that ultimately didn't say anything meaningful about society. The world in this novel seems similar to that in the MaddAddam trilogy, and while that series doesn't knock my socks off, its treatment of these ideas is a lot more complex and successful. The characters are really bland. There are various minor plot holes that are pretty annoying, especially when I normally think of Atwood as such a meticulous writer. I don't object to a comical treatment of dystopia (actually, I think that can be really great when done properly), but this just ended up feeling underdeveloped and banal. Definitely the worst of the twelve Atwood novels that I've read so far.

[brokentune]

DNF @ 23%.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Can't find anything to keep me reading this exercise in the bizarre.
This must be a joke, surely!
I just don't get it. Any of it.