Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury/Allen & Unwin
Otago Daily Times , October 17th 2015
Written with her characteristically biting and satiric wit, Margaret Atwood’s latest offering is an all-too plausible cautionary tale that, like A Handmaid’s Tale, straddles the uneasy boundary between conventional and speculative fiction.
The story is set in a near-future world where a sudden financial and economic collapse has cut a swathe through the America’s heartland, and its central characters, Stan and Charmaine, are typical casualties: a white, middle-class couple reduced to living in their car and scrabbling for money wherever they can find it. So it is hardly surprising that when they hear about the Positron Project, a new social initiative designed to address the ballooning rates of unemployment, homelessness and crime, they are quick to sign on as test subjects.
The basic premise behind the scheme is a simple one; successful applicants will for a self-sustaining, gated community consisting of a central prison, Positron, and surrounding village, Consilience. Citizens will spend alternate months as prisoners, growing crops and manufacturing goods to finance the project, and civilians who work to maintain and support the gaol.
Once inside its walls, nobody is permitted to leave, but in return, everybody has a home, a job and the freedom to live a meaningful life. Or, as the Project’s slogan puts it, “Do time now, buy time for our future!”
Consilience itself resembles a 50’s-themed country town, albeit one fitted out with the latest mod cons, and initially the couple are happy with their new life. But as time passes both the couple find their bland, comfortable lives– and each other’s company – increasingly unsatisfying. Longing for emotionally and sexually passionate relationships, first Charmaine and then Stan enter into illicit liaisons with their spousal Alternates, the couple that occupy their home while they are in prison, only to find themselves pawns in a battle that will end either with their death or the fall of the Project itself.
The novel is redolent with themes and concerns that Atwood has been exploring for many years in both fiction and essay form; the corrupting and corrosive effect of an individualistic and consumerist society, the lengths to which individuals will go in order to survive, and the necessary fictions we tell ourselves in order to justify our actions and sustain our relationships.
Although there are echoes of the hedonistic society prefacing the dystopia of the Oryx and Crake trilogy, it is also firmly grounded in contemporary culture – it is not a big leap from Circo-run prisons and Disney villages to the Project – and Atwood is not afraid to embrace moral ambiguity. As Chief Medical Administrator, Charmaine is particularly proud of her humane and professional approach to the Special Procedures by which disruptive element (such as the original inmates of the prison) are disposed of, and every character is motivated as much by self-interest as any impulse towards the greater good.
Despite this, The Heart Stops Last is a far from preachy novel. Full of plot twists and beautifully comic touches, it is as entertaining as it is thought provoking, and it is clear that Margaret Atwood remains one of the premier novelists of our time.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/entertaining-and-thought-provoking
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