The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood: Life in a hellish, familiar future

Life seems unlikely to get any worse for the struggling married couple centre stage on Margaret Atwood’s latest cartoon featuring our society’s ongoing decline. Stan and Charmaine have lost their jobs and their home. Reduced to living in their car, a third-hand Honda, Stan, although taller, confines himself to the front seat. His reasoning is that in the event of needing a quick getaway, his reactions are better. “He doesn’t trust Charmaine’s ability to function under those circumstances; he says she’d be too busy screaming to drive.” Still she is attempting to preserve her sense of humour.

The wry Canadian seer has long known that the world is a mess and most humans are borderline crazy. Her tone has become increasingly sardonic as she spins yarns which are knowing and astute, at times a bit too clever. Few writers do gleeful droll quite as punchy as Atwood who rarely deals in sentiment, although Charmaine the soft-faced wife does possess a baby-doll charm. She also takes comfort from the apparently endless supply of old sayings she can remember absorbing from her dear departed Grandma Win.

Apocalyptic

Set in the US in the terrifyingly near future, it is a romp worthy of the Coen Brothers. As Stan sits, cramped in his car, pondering the very different fate of his criminal brother Conor, well aware that unlike him his brother won’t “have lost his job in the big financial-crash business-wrecking meltdown that turned this part of the country into a rust bucket . . . Unlike Stan, he hasn’t been expelled, cast out, condemned to a life of frantic, grit-in-the eye, rancid armpit wandering.”

That is another of Atwood’s talents; she enjoys pointing out that Hell is a whole lot closer than her readers would like to think. It is clear that she believes if she is going to engage in speculative fiction, which she does, there is little point unless it feels immediate. While Cormac McCarthy has cornered the market in the apocalyptic, Atwood has made offbeat satire her chosen territory. She wants to scare us, yet she also plans on being entertaining.

So there they are, her fallen couple, huddled in their car: "They keep the windows mostly closed because of the mosquitoes and the gangs and the solitary vandals." The lingering memory of the day they gave up trying to sell their house and simply walked away from it continues to haunt Stan. He is a basic sort of guy who wonders on hearing a woman mention Paradise Lost if it was a book that had been made into an HBO mini-series "or something".

Revealing little details

He blames himself for letting Charmaine down although he has tried everything: “Stan has sold his blood twice, though he didn’t get much for it. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ the woman said to him as she handed him a paper cup of fake juice after his second blood drain, ‘but some people have asked us if we want to buy their babies’ blood, can you imagine?’” Stan is surprised, if only because as he sees it, babies don’t have much blood. Note the use of “fake” – Atwood is very conscious of the little details that reveal so much.

Charmaine has a crummy bar job. Ironically it is while she is at work, wiping down the counter, again, and gazing at the nearest flat screen that she notices something different from the inevitable baseball game. It’s a man in a suit, just the head and shoulders, looking . . . right into her eyes. “Tired of living in your car,” he asks, and Charmaine feels he is speaking directly to her. She is transfixed and wants to become part of what he is offering, a new way of life. The Positron Project situated in the town of Consilience promises a return to daily existence as it once was “before the dependable world we used to know was disrupted”. Charmaine sees salvation, although aware Stan will initially need some convincing, she knows he will agree.

Although a most cerebral and dauntingly informed writer, Atwood is capable of conveying intense inner turmoil as she did in her finest novel, Cat's Eye (1988) and, to a lesser extent, in The Blind Assassin which won her the Booker Prize in 2000.

Since then she has tended to forfeit any emotional force for the sake of that extra laugh. But this time she does expend some effort into making her beleaguered couple vaguely believable as we are constantly privy to their thoughts: Charmaine is a perky little woman, a do gooder by instinct she is also capable of obedience. This quality eventually becomes shockingly obvious. But before she is tested and succeeds, she is allowed several instances of the old style, fatalistic righteous logic she inherited from Grandma Win. She considers Sandi and Veronica, good looking girls who have embraced prostitution: “They won’t last, is Charmaine’s opinion. Either someone will beat them up and they’ll quit, or they’ll give up and start taking those drugs, which is another way of quitting. Or a pimp will move in on them; or one day they’ll just drop through a hole in space and no one will want to mention them, because they’ll be dead. It’s a wonder none of those things has happened yet. Charmaine wants to tell them to get out of here, but where would they go, and anyway it’s none of her business.”

This was before she discovered the Positron Project and it all changed. The deal seems simple. Live in a clean, comfortable house every second month, no questions asked and for the 30 or so days in between consent to being an innocent inmate. You share your house with people who reside in it while you are in prison. On your release, they return. As for the real criminals, well they get re-located – permanently. It all goes pretty well at first, but in keeping with the example set by Adam and Eve, Stan and Charmaine become obsessed with their invisible fellow housemate and begin to fantasise about them. Stan’s obsessive imaginings are fairly heated, but shy little Charmaine becomes active almost immediately.

Complete with sex robots and weird operations it all adds up to a blackish if goofball variation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and never approaches the menace of George Orwell's 1984 (1949). An unexpected moment of profundity materialises from Stan of all people as he grapples with his Elvis Presley costume complete with fake lips and new black eyebrows and realises that he does resemble the dead singer: "Oddly he does look something like Elvis. Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture?"

For Stan and Charmaine, a harmless non-heroic pair, it is all a bit bewildering; for the reader it is merely ambivalent. There are some good running gags such as the concocted version of a glorious death for Stan while defending the project’s chickens from a fire and Atwood sustains the streetwise third-person narrative voice.

She has always possessed a subversive streak with a wily imagination to match. It is not quite a happy ending, more of a temporary respite. As savvy as ever, she seems to be suggesting that communal delusion is the sole comfort in a world now controlled by corporate rhetoric.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent.

Margaret Atwood will be in conversation with Paula Shields as part of the dlr Library Voices Series on September 30th, at 7.30pm in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dún Laoghaire