Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Heart Goes Last, is difficult to encapsulate or characterize. It’s also hard to concisely state what exactly the novel is about, as the plot structure is fairly complex and covers a variety of conflicts, centred on its main characters. In The Heart Goes Last, the story of Stan and Charmaine is told: a married couple experiencing the financial hardships of an economically devastated America.
The novel’s setting is, perhaps, disturbing because it’s close to home; the subtle shift from realism to dystopia is unsettling because of its ease and fluidity. From the time Stan and Charmaine sign up for Positron/Consilience, it is a downhill slope into disconcerting dystopia, but the reader doesn’t feel the same sense of removal or distance that Atwood evokes in The Handmaid’s Tale. The implication seems to be that dystopia is getting closer; it’s right around the corner of the next economic collapse.
The novel switches back and forth between Stan and Charmaine, following or focalizing on them one at a time in a way that provides insight to their thoughts with the removal of third-person narration. This ties into the voyeuristic feel of the whole novel, and also the theme of surveillance as the reader has access to Stan’s thoughts and Charmaine’s through free indirect discourse, not limited to what they say. In fact, the reader’s access to each character’s thoughts makes what they actually say even more unsettling as we are positioned to understand that they are following some sort of script, one that is not always in line with what they are thinking.
The alternating styles of narration also echo the evolution of Charmaine and Stan’s relationship. The underlying hostility and resentment they feel towards each other about mundane issues are of a realist sort, such as sorting out sleeping arrangements when they live in their car during the first few pages of the novel. Even within the dystopian plot, the problems between Stan and Charmaine are realistic and relatable, and each narrator draws the reader to empathize with them. However the characters feel towards each other, the reader also starts to feel that way with the strange effect that neither Stan or Charmaine is particularly likeable.
The Heart Goes Last is the name of the novel, but also the name of Part Four and a chapter within this section. In this chapter, the reader learns of Charmaine’s job in Positron: euthanizing criminals. “It’s only the worst criminals, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that. Most of the Procedures are men, but not all. Though none of the ones she’s done have been women, yet. Women are not so incorrigible: that must be it,” Atwood reveals on page 69 of the novel. Even in Charmaine’s narrative voice, Atwood injects a satirical tone of gender politics and the absolute authority of Positron. “The heart goes last” is also articulated by Charmaine’s free indirect discourse immediately after she euthanizes her most recent “patient,” meaning that the heart is the last thing to fail. There is a blending of the romantic heart and the physiological heart throughout the novel, which is reflected in the title.
By the end of the novel, I was left feeling unsettled but also strangely satisfied. This novel evoked a voyeuristic schadenfreude in me and I couldn’t figure out why I liked it so much. I didn’t like the characters, and the whole premise is disturbing in its dystopian realism, but the intricacies of the plot and Atwood’s style of narration, with the irony and satire of her own characters, combined for a novel that requires its reader to enjoy from a distance, to be the surveyor, and by doing so, draws attention to how naturally the practice of surveillance comes to us.