The Heart Goes Last

Not Atwood's best work but certainly one of her most ridiculous! I will not keeping this book in my library or recommend it to a friend.

Thoughts on “The Heart Goes Last” by Margaret Atwood Was it J.R.R. Tolkein who abhorred allegory? Perhaps because it was too heavy-handed and insulted the reader’s intelligence and imagination, forcing a point of view that he’d rather leave more ambiguous. While “The Heart Goes Last” certainly contains ambiguity, for all its page-turning excitement, I can only justify its fantastic characters and plot as mere devices to address the many fascinating themes she hits on in this gripping novel. Does free will exist? Does having a steady job and being young and beautiful lead to a stable, meaningful life? Is a slave to passion any different than a slave to violence or force? If slavery is not perceived as such by the enslaved, is it still slavery? What makes a fulfilling marriage? What makes a meaningful life? How much material comfort is required for a meaningful life? What are the limits of capitalism? What is the purpose of our prison-industrial complex? Any one of those topics could fill an entire novel and Ms. Atwood is able to pack them into one. The title of the book has two meanings, but I interpret it as a riff on 1:Corinthians 13:13; when you’ve lost faith and hope, love remains. Critics of the book pick up quickly that the characters and plot range from unrelatable to far-fetched. You have to accept that for a book to be worth your time, you need to put a bunch of ingredients in a pressure cooker and see what comes out. In this case, the principal ingredient is a young married couple living in their car in an economically-devastated part of the Northeastern US. Think Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” but with more nice guys, less roving cannibals, and a friendlier (though no less sinister) version of “Gilead” plunked in the middle. The book’s primary thesis is this: if given the choice between freedom or security, they decide for security, so what happens next? The desperately poor couple sign up to live in a closed city that offers a nice home, steady employment and food, safety from roving gangs...but there’s a catch. It’s a slow snowball of less and less freedom, and (surprise) less security in the end. The principal characters are not that believable, nor the plot very coherent, but I think both were besides the point for Ms. Atwood's purposes. I gave it 3/5 because although it was engrossing, the characters more achetypical than real. Maybe I agree with J.R.R. Tolkein a bit after all!