Review 37: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has got dystopian speculative fiction down. She probably gets up in the morning and chomps on a huge bowl of Dystopios, washed down with a hot cup of speculation.

In fact, she's got it so down that in The Heart Goes Last, one of her more recent offerings, the premise feels almost throwaway. It's not that it's not fully-considered, or incomplete - Atwood's world-building is as jam-hot as it ever was. It's more that it feels like she can slot it together with such ease that shocking elements don't even shock her anymore. There's real darkness in this story, but the tone across the book is much lighter than on some of her other works, and that can serve to jar a little.

The premise is that society has crumbled (natch) and an authoritarian new semi-socialist system has arisen to combat the cultural rot (mais oui). In this, people spend half their lives voluntarily in prison (A.K.A. Positron), and the other half out of it (in Consilience), to best capitalise on their economic output. The question is whether this such a controlled reality can truly serve happiness, and whether you can ever trust people not to exploit others.

It feels like Positron and Consilience represent, among other things, the animal urges and moral selves of the people in the book. They spend half their time following rules and keeping up appearances, but half the time they're absorbed by committing or thinking about infidelity and destructive acts - not unlike a professional footballer. This book as a whole really feels like an exploration of sexual honesty and control.

At times, it gets positively Shakespearean. There are mistaken identities, sexual treachery, modern-day love potions - even a band of rude mechanicals. This feels like ground that Atwood knows well, and she exploits it to her full advantage.

It's a funny, sad, light, dark read. What could be more fitting for a book about a system comprised of two polar opposite conditions?

--

This is my thirty-seventh book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

Comments

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

Review 25: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Dr. Kathryn Mannix

There’s not much more predictable than death. Not the exact nature of anyone’s death, but the fact that we’re all going to hit the doom saloon at one point or another. And yet we fear it; avoid preparing for it; create unhelpful taboos around it. On a scale of dopey things to do, this ranks right up there with Morris dancing. This is one of the key messages of Dr. Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind . Through a number of examples from her time working in palliative care, she explores what death really looks like and how to come to terms with it in an age increasingly concerned with preserving life at all costs. There are some genuinely moving points in the book, but for me none was more so than the first time she watches a consultant describe the dying process to a woman with a terminal condition, who is scared of the pain and loss of dignity she believes it to include. Mannix carefully recounts the process for us to benefit from too: gradually increasing tiredness, regular cycl...

The 100 Book Year

Search This Blog