WINNER OF THE KITSCHIES RED TENTACLE AWARD FOR MOST PROGRESSIVE, INTELLIGENT AND ENTERTAINING SPECULATIVE NOVEL
Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine’s job at a dive bar, they’re increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs, and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience – a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a home of their own – they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell.
At first, all is well. But slowly, unknown to the other, Stan and Charmaine develop a passionate obsession with their counterparts, the couple that occupy their home when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire take over, and Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.
A sinister, wickedly funny novel about a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free, The Heart Goes Last is Margaret Atwood at her heart-stopping best.
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.
