A twisted satire where there are no heroes
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trip speaks to tough economic times while evoking the Victorian era
Margaret Atwood is clearly having fun.
Her latest book, The Heart Goes Last, is a romp of a book featuring sex robots, Elvis impersonators and blue teddy bears that are sure to give you nightmares for weeks to come.
And she’s having a blast on Twitter, of which she’s a prodigious user — she’s tweeted pics of herself in Vegas on the arm of a Captain Jack impersonator.
“That’s the fun bit” about social media, she says in an interview in the airy downtown Toronto offices of Penguin Random House Canada where we’re talking about the book as well as the possibilities of technology.
The Heart Goes Last began on Byliner, a “boutique” website that published literary authors online. Four episodes of the then-titled “Positron” series went up, but Byliner went down and the rights for the story reverted to Atwood and her Byliner editor Amy Grace Lloyd suggested it become a book.
She calls it “a dark romantic comedy in which there are no heroes.” But as with anything Atwood, satire ensures that even when you are having fun, you feel slightly uncomfortable.
The Heart Goes Last is a comment on current politics — on unbridled capitalism, on the trend to the conservative right, on the tough economic times being faced by young people whose employment is precarious and whose dreams of a stable job, home and family are getting tougher to attain.
It’s a thoroughly modern story, yet Atwood hearkens back to Victorian times and that era’s novels of manners and the 1950s. She’s long had a keen interest in the history and use of prisons — what should they be used for: punishment, to pay off a debt, to reform people, to make them penitent?
“We really need to think about that because right now we have an overstuffed prison system that’s full of people who probably shouldn’t be there at all and they’re learning to be criminals.” This gives you a clue to what she really seems to be getting at in the latest of her more than 40 books of poetry, non-fiction and fiction.
So the idea is: why not use the prison for good: let’s give everybody a job and a roof over their heads. That gives birth in the book to the Positron Project — those who sign up live happily in the town of Consilience; the only trick is they have to live in a prison every second month.
“This is a nice utopian scheme, it is a time-sharing scheme in which you play the prisoner one month and you get to be a citizen the next month.”
The world of Consilience is filled with echoes of the ’50s. “They structure it to be a very calming situation.”
It doesn’t quite work out as a panacea to society’s ills, but it does provide Atwood a way of looking at human nature — both of those who are running the joint and those who have signed up to stay inside.
While she is adamant there will be no spoilers, Atwood will say “I do think absolute power corrupts, and I do think abso- lute temptation is very tempting if you think that nobody has oversight or can catch you doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
While it might seem rather hopeless, Atwood doesn’t see it that way. She’s compassionate, but she doesn’t let us dodge personal responsibility. Which brings us back to the sex robots. “With each of the technologies we develop there’s a good side, a dark side and a stupid side which are the effects we hadn’t anticipated. It’s a Pandora’s box.
“We’ve discovered a lot of things that could’ve destroyed us and we’ve pulled back in time,” she notes. The technology is neutral, she says. It’s what we humans do with it that counts.