If the characteristics of dystopian fiction, and the word dystopian itself, comprise an imagined future state where great suffering and injustice prevail, then Celeste Ng’s latest novel nails the brief. In an uncanny, near-future America, citizens live curtailed lives under the legislation of PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, an ostensibly patriotic set of laws used to suppress minorities, particularly those of Asian descent, by removing children from families who step out of line.
Readers and viewers of the many dystopian-themed books and adaptations in popular culture, or indeed fans of history, will be familiar with the path that leads to such tyranny. Economic instability, recession, civil unrest, a government crackdown, propaganda, violence and bloodshed in the name of law and order. For much of Our Missing Hearts, Ng creates this new world order with restraint and ingenuity. Following a period known as “the Crisis” — the worst recession in American history — what remains is a country consumed by fear, a nation looking for someone to blame: “They would settle, in a few years, on China, that perilous, perpetual yellow menace.”
The first success of the book is Ng’s decision to land the reader into the dystopia, without giving context. We meet Noah — aka Bird — a nine-year-old boy who lives in a small, poorly insulated apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his father, a former linguistics professor, now stacking shelves at a library in Harvard. Their interactions are functional, joyless, filled with paranoia. Noah isn’t allowed to mention his mother, Margaret, an Asian-American poet who disappeared three years earlier. He goes to school, keeps his head down, does his homework on the importance of PACT, goes to bed. These short, intense scenes build to a compelling portrait of a father and son living in fear.
The child voice offers an intriguing perspective, relayed skilfully by Ng: “The fear that rose in him like a ruffled thing grew smooth and sleek again ... His brain is like a big dog penned in his skull, restless and pacing, aching for a run ... As a child, he understands instinctively how arbitrary punishment can be.” The child narrators of Richard Powers’s Bewilderment and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime come to mind, though there is less dramatic irony in this instance as the reader is as fully in the dark as Bird. Margaret Atwood, the godmother of dystopian fiction, is another obvious comparison.
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The great strength of Our Missing Hearts is Ng’s ability to plot and pace her story. It is this talent, one suspects, that has resulted in phenomenal sales of her first two books, Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, which together have sold more than 1.3 million copies. Ng has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in more than 30 languages.
In Our Missing Hearts Ng uses the hero’s journey or quest narrative — there are overt references that seem a little too knowing for the voice — which plays out as a series of mystery clues, obstacles and mentor figures as Bird attempts to track down his mother. When he finds her, in a neatly rendered near-future New York, she’s on a mission to stop PACT through an act of defiance whose details are cleverly withheld, creating suspense and resulting in a gloriously dissonant surprise towards the end of the book.
An author’s note at the end reminds the reader that there is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children from families as a means of political control
Not everything fares as successfully. Narrated in three parts, with Bird’s mother taking over for much of Parts II and III, the vividness of early sections dissolves amid pages and pages of back story that fill in the history of the Crisis and PACT. Although this history feels more grounded in the real world than the dystopian part of the novel, it is somehow less believable. Rather than experience the chaos first-hand, we are simply told about all the terrible and dramatic things that happened, one after the other.
It is easy for sentimentality to bleed into writing of this kind. There is a tendency towards the saccharine, particularly when Margaret recounts her idyllic former life as a wife and mother, and the loss she has felt in the intervening years. More clarity is needed too about her role as a poet activist, which seems largely a misunderstanding by the authorities, but one that Margaret never attempts to correct.
These issues are mitigated by the originality of the world that Ng has created, which is, like the best dystopian fiction, sadly inspired by real life. An author’s note at the end reminds the reader that there is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children from families as a means of political control. Our Missing Hearts is a fictionalised version of that horror, with resonance far beyond the page.
