i wasn't sure what to expect from atwood. i know she is a sci-fi writer and that isn't a genre i would consider my self a fan of. however, everyone was excited about it online, so i decided to give it a try. i was pleasantly surprised by how much i enjoyed this work. to start, i had no idea what the book was about, from the cover it looked as if it was about prison like in the future we would all be prisoners. and i guess this could a great one sentence summary.
the heart goes last is set in a distant future in which the economy has collapsed and the middle and lower classes are left to live in their cars and rummage for food and money. the upper class have not been effected and still have wealth. the novel is about a married couple, stan and charmaine, tired of living out of their car and scared of the crime that could occur. they decided to sign up to live in consilience, a project based on the prison system. since prisons create jobs and help sustain a community (i know i live in a town with two prisons), members of this community live as a prisoner for one month and then live outside as a civilian for next, and alternate back and forth. they are given jobs both in and out of the prison. they share homes with alternates that are in prison when they are home and vice versa. they are not suppose to communicate with their alternates.
however, charmaine had an affair with her alternate and this caused a series of events to unfold because the man's wife was a woman that worked in surveillance and was assistant to the head of the project. using the affair as a cover, she then pressured stan into helping her stop the project by taking information into the outside world. it turns our that the project originally was an actual prison and they began to kill off prisoners that were disobedient and harvested them for body parts. this business started to become lucrative business, and so they started killing of people. in addition to this, their biggest export were sex bots, which then lead to them operating on brains so that the first thing a person saw post-opt they imprinted on and basically became their sex slaves. stan was to expose all of this, but to get him into the outside world, he had to fake his death by charmaine killing him.
sounds like an exciting book, yes? well it was until the end. there was all this great build up but then it was like atwood wasn't sure how to end it. there was some mission that took place in vegas which reminded me of ocean's 11. and the outside world learned of what was occurring but unsure if anything really stopped. and the head of the project turned into a sex slave due to the operation. charmaine had the same operation and imprinted on stan, only to learn that she never had the operation.
this twist at the end felt odd, and i wondered what atwood wanted us to take from it. that love is not real but a construct of our minds like everything else in life. that the heart does goes last but not due to love but because it is a muscle and simply is the last to complete its function. it feels cold for an ending but seems true. we place all this emphasis on following your heart, but really your heart is guided by your brain, so it's your brain all along!
another lesson could be that of obedience, in which today especially, we so blindly follow what is presented to us that we don't question it and just believe. so many times i see individuals post articles on facebook, only for me to google and find they are not true. it reminded me of the study in which people were instructed to shock individuals and though they knew it was wrong, they did it since an authority figure instructed them to do so. the members of the community worked in this prison and just followed instructions without realizing what they were actually contributing to. this leads to the usual lesson of futuristic tales to question your government and to not conform.
lastly, since the story centered around prisons it reminded me of the stanford experiment. that study dealt with the conforming of roles to that of authority and inferior. though there did not seem to be any abuse of authority within the prison, we did see it from wife in surveillance. since the prison was set up as a business, i wonder if atwood's critique would be that of how we criminalize individual to sustain this business, which i would counter, i have seen these prisoners after their release and they deserve to be there. i will say it is horrible the amount of funds that is put into our prison system, especially in california, and if atwood was advocating that i am with her. i will have to google to see what she says on the matter.
all in all, a great novel with a weak ending but definitely worth reading.
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