The Heart Goes Last

Review Originally Posted At: FictionForesight

In accordance with current FTC Guidelines, please let it be known this book was received through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

3.5 Stars!

If you’ve read any of Atwood’s work before, you’ll know she has a penchant for taking current technology to the next step, and then exploring its causes and consequences. She herself dubbed her work as “speculative fiction,” and I tend to agree – not quite distant or fantastical enough to classify as science fiction, her stories are mostly set in a very relatable near future. Another hallmark of her imagination is her complete lack of faith in society as whole – her depictions of the upcoming decades are nearly always quite show more grim. The Positron series, as the book in question was originally titled, is another rumination on both of these themes.

Our heroes are the not-so-plucky Stan and Charmaine, a married couple living out of their car in the wasteland that is the Eastern US after the credit bubble bursts. Businesses and banks have failed and it’s now a lawless opportunist’s dream. Charmaine is employed at a dirty bar and barely earns enough money to keep gas in the car. So when she sees an ad for Consilience on TV, it sounds too good to be true. A place where you’re guaranteed a job, a house, and food on the table as long as you spend every other month in a prison – and as long as you have no contact with the outside world. Despite all subconscious warnings, Stan and Charmaine sign on. And for a few months, it’s a ‘50s utopia, complete with hedge trimmers and floral tablecloths. But of course, events start to unfold that pull the slipcover off the sofa to show all the nasty, greasy stains underneath. The facade starts to crumble, both around the corners of Charmaine and Stan’s marriage, and around the idyllic picture presented to Consilience residents by the overseers. What’s really happening behind the walls of Positron? Are Consilience’s investors finding illicit ways to profit? Will Stan and Charmaine pull through, or do they have a bigger purpose in the whole operation?

In the beginning we follow our two protagonists as they desperately try to carve a niche for themselves in a world that doesn’t seem to have any room left for them. They cling to each other for support, washing over the minor interpersonal struggles in order to survive. But when they transplant themselves to the simple, undemanding community of Consilience, the cracks in their relationship begin to show. It’s a stark representation of human will that becomes more and more convoluted. As the story progresses and we meet some of Consilience/Positron’s key players, both Stan and Charmaine are swept up in roles pivotal to the success or ultimate demise of the “project.” The author’s focus turns from small, individual struggles with morality, to how these individuals influence the corporate grey area and the Positron’s clandestine workings. We get the sense that while both Stan and Charmaine struggle with some of their poor choices, they really do care for each other and we root for them to end up happy and together. Atwood manages to make them relatable even through their transgressions, which in my opinion takes a deft hand and a dark mind. However, as their roles in the plot are revealed, they lose what little sense of agency they had and become unwilling pawns in a larger conflict. Even though this makes them less likable, I think it is a purposeful move by the author to make us consider the role of the individual in a larger, more morally corrupt system.

I would be remiss if I didn’t gush a little bit about Margaret Atwood’s style. It is always a joy to come back to her books – while thematically they are dark and heavy, her prose is very straightforward and clear. Her sentences are unpretentious, but somehow she manages to suggest just enough detail to create a world that is incredibly clear and personal to the readers. She doesn’t describe facts, she suggests a reference point and lets the reader form their own ideas about the style of a couch, the look of a certain woman, the type of car that Stan and Charmaine sleep in. Charmaine fears being “crushed in his embrace like a stepped-on blueberry muffin.” Stan, when he’s informed he’s about to do something he doesn’t get a choice in, “peers down over the edge of the next half hour. Mist, a sheer drop. He feels sick.” Atwood delights in making emotions and relationships something very tangible and visceral. I think that is what brings me back every time. Even if her characters are not always the most relatable, their reality and their reactions are so close to our own that we are drawn in any way.

Lauded as Margaret Atwood’s first standalone novel since 2010, The Heart Goes Last was actually started in 2012, as the first installment of a 5-part digital serial. Atwood is known for pushing the boundaries of technology and this work is a “new” approach to a novel – digitally publishing one installment at a time, without knowing what would come next. This method of publishing added an extra dimension to the writing process – Atwood was able to receive reader feedback on the story after each section, and use it to shape the next. However, it also meant that she was not able to go back and revise the story as a whole. I did not follow the story as it was released (I didn’t even know it was happening, apparently I live under some sort of rock), meaning I have the distinct pleasure of reviewing it as a fully finished oeuvre. Approached as a finished novel, it does suffer a little bit from the initial style of publishing, and the pacing of the plot staggers and starts a little in odd places. The conclusion feels a bit cheap and just a little forced, although this could be construed as a metaphor for the characters’ choice of ending. It was difficult to link the ending chapters back to the book I thought I was starting, and thematically I had lost the thread a couple of times by the end.

Overall, The Heart Goes Last is not the best of Margaret Atwood’s works – other books have had a larger scope and covered more exciting thematic ground. However, I think for anyone new to Atwood, this is as good as a place as any to start. I enjoyed it as much if not more than the last two MaddAddam books. I think the prose was more playful and the characterization more introspective, which appeals to me. The more time I have to think on the novel all together, with a little bit of distance – the more I appreciate it.

(www.FictionForesight.com) show less

My video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJzzOvDs5ZQ

Atwood's latest novel, The Heart Goes Last, is a darkly comic adventure through a dystopian possible world. Economic collapse has left over half the population of North East America jobless. Over time, joblessness has slid into homelessness, homelessness into destitution. A married couple, Stan and Charmaine, are among those now facing hardship. They live in their car with their few possessions, constantly on the run from marauding gangs of thieves and rapists. Charmaine works behind the bar in a rundown dive, with two students-turned-prostitutes who have set up shop in one of the booths, while Stan searches desperately for a new job, selling his blood for small change.

Reaching show more a point of utter desperation, Stan seeks out his criminally inclined brother Conor, and gets enough money from him to avoid joining the criminal element himself, at least yet. It is then that Charmaine sees an advertisement on the large screen tv at work:

"Remember what your life used to be like?" says the man's voice, during the tour of sheets and pillows. "Before the dependable world we used to know was disrupted? At the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, it can be like that again...

Charmaine takes down the number. In spite of the mysterious warnings given by Conor, Charmaine and Stan enter the project, knowingly cutting themselves off from the outside world, and forbidden ever to leave. Inside the divided town of Positron/Consilience, they are given everything the advertisement promised; a neat suburban house complete with clean sheets and hot baths, and full employment within the town of Consilience. In return, they swap their home every other month for a cell in Positron prison, while their “alternates” take their turn in the house. But even the time in prison is better than anything they could hope for outside the walls. There are hot meals, jobs and other occupations to pass the time, and their fellow prisoners are all, eventually, just applicants like them, the criminals having been mysteriously "relocated" over the first few months of the project.

With everything so much better than the nightmare they faced outside, Stan and Charmaine are easily able to overlook the subtle forms of control at work within the town. Surveillance cars roam the streets, with rumours that they can even see around corners; even if you can't see them they can see you, and even more sinisterly, all films, music, and entertainment are limited to a preapproved list consisting mainly of Doris Day.

Things start to fall apart when Stan and Charmaine's sexually stunted relationship is threatened by a seemingly chance encounter between Charmaine, and Stan's alternate "Max", which leads to a series of sexual encounters in abandoned houses on "switchover" days. These encounters drag both Stan and Charmaine into a plot to take down the Positron Project, and expose its incalculable evils to the world. This plot leads to an increasingly madcap adventure involving faked deaths, Elvis sex-bots, mind-control operations, blue knitted teddy bears, and a chain of Ruby Slippers retirement homes. It is a journey of humour and page-turning enjoyableness with a host of incredible characters, and impossible situations, all tied together by Atwood's masterful prose.

Sitting within Atwood's larger body of work, this is at home next to her other speculative works, such as the MaddAddam Trilogy, specifically Oryx and Crake, with which it shares many themes and pre-occupations; social and biological engineering, the inevitable corruption brought about by power, and the gated community as a microcosm for exploring the depths of human nature. If these themes are dealt with in a more superficial way in this novel, then it can be forgiven as a more plot-driven and vastly more comic read. But for all its surface, The Heart Goes Last still gives pause to moments of reflection. While its main characters are often unsympathetic and unlikable, and end up (in Charmaine's case in particular), making some horrifying decisions, they do feel like a 'typical married couple', and as such cause us as readers to ask, what would we do in their situation?

As well as the dystopian elements, this is also a book about contemporary marriage and relationships. About the mundane thoughts and behaviours of a couple, still in love, but without the spark, and how they deal with the situation they are in, and with each other. Stan is frustrated, prone to anger, and spends a lot of time wishing Charmaine was less prim, less calm, less annoyingly put together, while Charmaine is actually very annoying with the constant positive mantras passed down to her from her Auntie Win. But beneath that, she also harbours sexual resentment towards Stan for his uninspired performances in the back of their car, performances she'd rather avoid than encourage. In its twisted but nevertheless redemptive ending, the progression of their relationship through infidelity and beyond, proves what the much more sinister Special Procedure inside Positron prison had already shown: that the heart really does go last. show less

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Edelweiss. Trigger warning for rape and violence. This review contains clearly marked spoilers.)

"Never mind which wife is whose," says Jocelyn. "We can't waste time on the sexual spaghetti."

How bad are things when you can get nostalgic about living in your car?

The dystopian society at the heart of The Heart Goes Last is surprisingly mundane - which makes it all the more chilling. Stan and Charmaine live in the northeastern United States, which has been hit especially hard by the latest recession. Things went to ratshit seemingly overnight ("Someone had lied, someone had cheated, someone had shorted the market, someone had inflated currency. show more Not enough jobs, too many people."). Charmaine's company, an upscale retirement chain called Ruby Slippers, scaled back its eastern operations, leaving Charmaine out of a job; Stan's position at Dimple Robotics soon followed. They held onto their cozy starter home as long as they could, but before you can say "outsourcing," they'd lost that too. From solidly middle class to homeless, in the blink of an eye.

Now they sleep in their car, surviving on the meager wages Charmaine earns waiting tables in a seedy bar, desperately searching for work and trying to stay ahead of the roving gangs of thieves and rapists that own the streets come nightfall. So when Charmaine spots an ad for the Positron Project - an experimental city/prison in Consilience - the two are understandably quick to sign their lives away. Full employment, zero crime, free housing - and the only way you can leave is in a pine box. But why would anyone want to abandon the safety of these walls to go back out there? You can't eat freedom, yo.

Their first year in Consilience goes surprisingly well: Stan is assigned a job repairing scooters, and Charmaine works at one of the city's bakeries. Every other month, they leave their two-bedroom house and enter the Positron prison, where it's their turn to serve as prisoners. ("CONSILIENCE = CONS + RESILIENCE. DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE!") Though the amenities are a little less comfy, it's not all that different from civilian life (save for the gender segregation, of course): Stan is in charge of the prison's chicken farm, while Charmaine is Chief Medications Administrator in the prison hospital.

While they're in the slammer, their Alternates occupy their home, and vice versa. No one's supposed to know who their Alternates are, for obvious reasons: fights over sloppily trimmed hedges and dirty bathrooms are sure to ensue. But when Stan finds a saucy love letter under his fridge - addressed to Max from Jasmine and sealed with a fuschia kiss - he can't purge fantasies of Charmaine's Alternate from his mind. Before long, he graduates from obsession to stalking, bugging her scooter in the hopes of arranging a "chance" meeting - which will culminate in Jasmine giving in to his every whim. Naturally.

For Jasmine is everything Charmaine is not: Uninhibited. Passionate. Impulsive. Insatiable. A whore to Charmaine's prim and proper Madonna. Except not: Charmaine is Jasmine, and she's been having a hot-n-heavy affair with Stan's Alternate Max. Whose real name is Phil. Phil the sex addict, married to Jocelyn of Surveillance, who just so happens to be a co-founder of Positron. Enter the intrigue, suspense, and crazy weird long cons, as Stan finds himself sucked into Jocelyn's marital mind games and corporate espionage. In a twist everyone saw coming, Positron is even more sinister than it appears on the surface - and Jocelyn needs Stan's help to upend the system.

The Heart Goes Last is like a Russian Nesting Doll of plots and subplots: a dystopia wrapped in a portrait of a highly dysfunctional marriage, all nestled in a sometimes-comical critique of the prison-industrial complex. Just when you think you know where the story's headed, Atwood pulls the tastefully decorated, retro '50s rug out from under you. Yet while I adored the individual components, many of them so absurd and thoroughly Atwoodian - headless chickens, fed through tubes inserted directly into their necks ("humane" meat, anyone?); sexbots, custom-made to look like your favorite celeb, that hot barista at Starbucks who wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole, or a seven-year-old kid, if that's your thing; stealing the blood OF BABIES - they didn't quite add up to my (admittedly high) expectations.

Let's take the Positron prison, which stretched my credulity somewhat. Each citizen spends one month as a citizen, and the next as a prisoner, on a rotating schedule. This guarantees a 50% incarceration rate, which would presumably be impossible otherwise. (Try as we might, the United States has only reached .716%.)

The question I have is: why? Why would such a high incarceration rate be desirable? It's not like removing half the population from the citizenry reduces competition for jobs; everyone in the prison is assigned a job, such that every resident has two jobs, which rotate with their place of residence. It does create some unnecessary jobs in the form of prison guards, I suppose. But absent a prison these folks could be employed in a more productive and profitable way, such as knitting teddy bears for export or assembling sexbots (euphemistically called Possibilibots by the higher-ups).

I suppose the cells do cut down on housing costs, but if that's the case, why not just have everyone live in dorms? It's still worlds better than living outside the walls.

Then again, this could be a commentary on the prison-industrial complex itself - and the trend towards privatizing prisons, in particular. For-profit prisons don't operate with the social good in mind; they're in the business of making money. A high recidivism rate? Awesome! Repeat customers. College education and job training? What for? We want these people to come back, not function in the real world. The more people they can lock up, the fatter the bottom line. Of course, the Positron prison is practically a day spa compared to, say, Rikers. After they purged it of the "real" prisoners, anyway.

** begin spoilers **

Another thing you should know about The Heart Goes Last: there is a shit ton of rape. Like, I've come to expect it in dystopias, but this seemed excessive even to me. And worse, the characters don't always recognize it as such. I hope that readers will prove more astute, but you never know.

It all starts with Stan and Jocelyn. In order to get revenge on her cheating, sex addict husband Phil, Jocelyn switches his schedule with Stan's; Stan gets an extra month as a civilian, but the downside is that he has to spend it living with Jocelyn. She shows him the recordings of Charmaine and Phil bumping uglies in abandoned homes all over Consilience - and then demands that they recreate the scenes. She's in Surveillance and he's just been caught bugging his wife's scooter, so poor Stan doesn't have much say in the matter. This is rape, and it goes on for months.

Later on, when a reconciliation between Stan and Charmaine looks possible, Stan worries how he will explain this "affair" to his wife; in the grand scheme of things, the tally should ring up even, since she also cheated on him. Except he didn't cheat on her: he was raped. That's a crucial distinction. One that Jocelyn acknowledges but refuses to give import when she's blackmailing Stan yet again down the line.

The specter of rape rears its ugly head again vis-à-vis the sexbots. Stan goes undercover in the factory where they're assembled; when the grand tour reveals bots that resemble kids, Stan is understandably repulsed. (Stan, who pimped out chickens - albeit under duress - during his tenure as Poultry Supervisor in the prison. Stan, who considered raping a chicken himself. Not under duress, just run of the mill sexual frustration.) Thus ensues a spirited debate about whether such outlets will ultimately keep pedophiles from raping real children.

An interesting side note about the Possibilibots: While the technology is hella advanced and the business quite lucrative, so far scientists have been unable to replicate the full range of human facial expressions - and doubt they ever will. Close, but no dice.

Instead of trying to recreate the hardware, then, Positron has decided to steal it. Humans are kidnapped, subjected to risky neurosurgery designed to erase their previous attachments to others, and then "imprinted" on their new owners (there's really no better word for it), much like chicks with their mum. The first thing with eyes that a newly created sex slave sees upon wakening will be her (or his) sole source of desire forevermore. Why replicate that snooty barisata bitch when you can literally make her love you? I can just pictures the MRAs crowding in line, screaming SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONIES!!!!

Again, just to be clear: this is rape. Consent is meaningless if you've literally stripped the victim of free will.

And so it goes with Ed, the now-rogue co-founder of Positron whose rule Jocelyn hopes to overthrow. He becomes infatuated with Charmaine; commissions a replica of her (for which he bugs her bathroom, to get accurate photos for the blueprint); all with the ultimate goal of snatching her during a business trip to Las Vegas and having her brain rewired. So yeah, I'll go with Stan: a kiddybot will only work for so long. Escalation is the name of the game.

Which brings me to perhaps my biggest problem with The Heart Goes Last: the unsatisfying denouement. Some of the story's villains are punished, but in an Old Testament kinda way that's difficult to celebrate. Ed is made into a sexbot for reporter Lucinda Quant, a cancer survivor who hopes to rekindle her career by breaking the Positron scandal. Punishing a rapist with rape? Highly problematic.

Yet Ed's not the only one to come to such a fate: Jocelyn's cheating husband Phil is rewired into a sex slave for her co-conspirator Aurora, in exchange for her help, and Charmain is imprinted on Stan as a reward for smuggling valuable information out of Positron. While Phil might indeed be human excrement, the worst he ever did (at least that we know of) is run around on his wife; and, though Charmaine is indeed a murderer, Stan's impetus for subjecting her to the procedure isn't punishment, but possession. Gross gross gross.

** end spoilers **

As with many Margaret Atwood novels, the ending is pretty wide open - think Offred's escape from a still-functioning Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale - which isn't always my favorite, but I can work with it. Using rape as a punishment - as the only form of punishment - doesn't sit too well with me, however.

The final verdict: The Heart Goes Last isn't Margaret Atwood's best - but it's still Margaret Atwood. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I'm a ginormous Margaret Atwood fangirl, okay. show less

Not every book by a favorite author can be great (with the exception of Jane Austen). Inevitably, a disappointment comes along, and here comes one from an author who is a personal hero of mine, Margaret Atwood.

Set in a near future in generic any city, this satirical dystopia is about a young couple living in their car after a general financial collapse. Of course they jump at the opportunity to join Consilience, a utopian manufactured community where everybody has everything they need, so long as they agree to two conditions: they will spend every other month in prison, and they are completely cut off from the outside world. "Check in anytime you like, but you can never leave." Turns out, of course, that Consilience is a front for all show more sorts of underhanded activities, which really should have been obvious from the get-go. This book was originally published as a series of e-novellas, and it has that disjointed, making-it-up-as-we-go-along quality. This is very black humor that is often not funny. Atwood's messaging regarding security and freedom is pretty heavy-handed, the sexual content is more than a little disturbing, and the end just left me cold. It feels like a throw-off and certainly in no way resembles Atwood's more masterful dystopias, Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is such a strong writer than even a bad book by her is better than most other books, but the low rating is earned because I really expect so much more. show less

In the post-apocalyptic setting of this novel, Charmaine and her husband Stan are barely surviving. They are sleeping in their car and fending off the roving bands of murder hobos that wander the streets at night. When Charmaine hears about the new "experimental community" of Consilience, she is sure that it holds the answer to their troubles. Everyone is promised a job, a home, and plenty of food. And every other month, they spend in prison. It's a small price to pay for stability, and at first things are great.

But then both Charmaine and Stan begin illicit affairs with the couple that uses their home when they are rotated to do their shift in prison. This infidelity drives a wedge between them and quickly gets them embroiled in the show more dark and sordid inner workings of the Consilience compound. Something is truly rotten at the heart of this endeavor, and it's not just the factory making sex-bots.

A bewildering mix of humor, satire, and deeply disturbing imagery, this novel is haunting and thought provoking long after you put the book down. show less

The Heart Goes Last is quite the farce. We follow married couple Charmaine and Stan through the trials and tribulations of a near future life following an economic crash that leaves them homeless. It takes them from living in their car, trying to avoid the feral criminal underclass that roams the streets, to a project intended to deliver a fair and happy life for everyone who signs up to splitting their time between prison and homelife in return for free housing, food and a guaranteed job. Of course, this is Margaret Atwood, so nothing is as it seems.

Along the way, there are affairs, executions, selling of body parts, knitted teddy bears, Elvis sexbots, and a whole lot of credulity stretching nonsense. It's entertaining but surprisingly show more throwaway for a Margaret Atwood novel. show less

Digital audiobook performed by Cassandra Campbell and Mark Deakins.

In a country facing economic and social collapse, Stan and Charmaine struggle to hold onto their love and their marriage. Having lost their jobs, they wind up living in their car, where they are preyed upon by gangs of roving thugs. Stan’s about to turn to his brother Conor, who’s some sort of underworld criminal, when Charmaine happens to see an ad on the TV at the bar where she’s a parttime cocktail waitress. The Positron Project promises jobs, clean living conditions, an idyllic environment. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to have a neat little house again, clean clothes, good food, a job where she could actually contribute! The catch? The couples who sign up live show more in the tidy bungalows only half the year; the other half they switch with another couple who have been in prison. It’s a win-win situation, the ad promises. But, of course, promises are cheap, reality costly.

Damn but Atwood is a fine writer! I love how she shows us this young couple , their dreams and ambitions revealed through their actions. They make mistakes, as we all do, and they become desperate to change their circumstances. Can they find the strength to pull together? They trusted the Positron promise, and look where THAT got them? Dare they trust that there is a way out? Will their love survive?

And what IS love? Is it passion and excitement? Is it devotion and sacrifice without thought to self? Can we choose whom and how to love, or is it an emotion so powerful that we are helpless in its grasp, destined to follow the path laid out before us?

At times the scenarios are quite humorous (the Last Vegas Elvis impersonators are a hoot), and other times I cringed with embarrassment at Charmaine’s naivete or wanted to warn Stan that “No! that’s not a good idea!” I was as unsure about whom to trust as they were.

Two very talented voice artists perform the audio version. The change in narrator helps to clearly show the changes in point of view. show less