Urban Dystopia

In 2011, when the digital publisher Byliner burst into the scene, it promised bite-sized literature to go with your cappuccino—a “perfect story to enjoy while you sip coffee, travel to work, or cosy up for an evening in”. The stories, starting at $0.99 and “guaranteed to entertain”, were e-singles and serialised fiction, harking back to what Charles Dickens did in the 19th century. One of the marquee names was Margaret Atwood, the writer who conjures dystopia and devious machines in her writings but is quick to try out the latest technology in the real world. She wrote four instalments of a story, Positron, in 2012-13. Byliner has now gone under, but Positron has emerged as Atwood’s wry, wicked new novel, The Heart Goes Last. This novel is also rather unsure of itself – and it is tempting to fault Byliner for that but Atwood has to take the blame.

The Heart Goes Last opens in a third-hand Honda in a desperate, derelict city. Stan and his wife Charmaine are living their cramped lives in their car. They have lost their jobs, the mortgaged house and their happy lives on their new couch with flowered pillows. People—homeless, jobless, cashless— are wandering the streets looking for a stale doughnut to eat, a house to loot, a car to steal, a woman to rape. Atwood paints miserable lives in masterly matter-of-factness.

The reason for this is eerily familiar: a financial freefall, like the 2008 crisis, that saw “trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheet like fog off the windowsill”. Atwood’s suggestion that this urban dystopia was almost upon us makes it all the more terrifying.

There is a way out of this bleak world for Stan and Charmaine, a promised land: the Positron Project. It assures security in return for freedom. It has a “model” town, Consilience, with a retro 1950s look. Once you enter the place, there is no turning back, no exit door. But if you sign in, as Ed, the big cheese of the project, assures, there will be a house to live in and fluffy towels in the bathroom. The goal is maximum possible happiness.

Charmaine falls for this. It is in her wrenching yearning for the ordinary that Atwood makes her the relatable hero: “Will there be a washer and dryer in that new home? Of course there will. And a dining table. Recipes: she’ll be able to cook recipes again… They’ll sit on chairs while eating.”

But this is Atwood. And this golden project has an evil twin. The Consilience town comes with the Positron Prison. And everyone will have two lives: citizens/ inmates. One month, half the population will live and work in the town and the next month they will live and work as prisoners. Like everyone else, Stan and Charmaine will share their house with a couple of Alternates, who will stay in their home when Stan and Charmaine do time. There is no pornography or hip-hop music or violent movies in Consilience. There is no free will. “The whole town is under a bell jar.”

As Jocelyn, Ed’s right-hand woman, tells Stan: “… once you have got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want….” The first part of Atwood’s novel is a stinging piece that warns what happens when utilitarianism’s greatest good for the greatest number is divorced from democracy. It is a caution against American capitalism’s greed and China’s socialist dictatorship.

Consilience is now geared to satisfy—for a big price tag— man’s ultimate carnal desires: healthy organs, willing lovers. The old trope of dystopia appears as people who don’t fit in are eliminated and turned into organs and DNA for the rich outside. The workers of Consilience are also making robots to satisfy every sexual fetish. Atwood is having a lot of fun here, describing Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe robots and how “replica women” have been customised to suit the kinky fantasies of customers: some robots moan, others can whimper “harder”, the platinum range can even breathe.

This is the post-Byliner section of Atwood’s novel, and it turns into a comic pastiche. The great escape from Consilience is like a Laurel and Hardy slapstick set piece.

There are actually three bewildering turns to this book: from the shadowlands of Consilience to the campy comedy of Stan’s escape and then a parable- like ending that is meant to put these disparate parts together. It makes you do a double take and leaves you with a lopsided smile—because it says if you are not in someone else’s prison, then you could be the prisoner of your own mind. That kind of lopsided smile, sadly, is what stale Paulo Coelho once used to write an entire book for, not brilliant Margaret Atwood.

(Charmy Harikrishnan is a Kerala-based journalist)

Bloomsbury IndiabooksMargaret AtwoodThe Heart Goes Last