In a not-too-distant future, following economic and social turmoil, an authoritarian government has taken power in the US. Civil liberties have been rolled back. Wrung out by years of crisis, the population largely aquiesces in its loss of freedom. The country’s leaders stoke fears about the rise of China, pass draconian laws to enforce patriotic behaviour, ban books and foment hatred against PAOs: People of Asian Origin.
Depressingly, not much about the dystopian setting in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts seems that far-fetched. Even the passing of a bill entitled “Preserving American Culture and Traditions” feels like a plausible extrapolation from current events. “PACT will protect us from the very real threat of those who undermine us from within,” the unnamed president tells the American people. The bill’s provisions include wide-ranging measures to stamp out all forms of internal dissent, and it gives the government the power to remove children from parents deemed un-American.
Amid this creeping oppression, in Cambridge, Massachusetts – once a bastion of liberal tolerance and academic excellence – 12-year-old Noah is growing up under the care of his dad, Ethan. Ethan is an affable, bookish man, but like almost everyone else, he’s unwilling to challenge the forces of reaction. Demoted from his academic post to working as a librarian, he advocates keeping quiet and carrying on.
Things are not so simple for Noah. Half Asian on his mother’s side, and therefore already suspect, he’s a quirky, sensitive child who insists on being called Bird, a nickname of his own invention. And his absent mother, Margaret, who abandoned the family when he was eight, is widely regarded as a traitor to the new regime.
As the novel opens, Bird has just received an unexpected message from his mother. Just enough backstory is sketched in for us to grasp the nature of Bird’s world and the terrible dilemma in which he finds himself. Will he stick with his compromising father, or follow the clues in the message in the hope of finding his way back to his politically undesirable mother?
It’s not giving too much away, I hope, to reveal that Bird chooses the second option and goes on a journey that reveals the moral bankruptcy of the regime and introduces him to the handful of people resisting it.
Our Missing Hearts follows the blockbuster success of Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, an international bestseller which was adapted for television. That too is a book about a failed utopian experiment, though on a more modest and naturalistic scale. Set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere took the form of a whodunnit, the solving of which anatomises the moral failings of the privileged Richardson family and their friends, and explores themes of motherhood, class, art and identity.
In other ways, Our Missing Hearts feels like a deliberate and almost defiant break with the previous novel. Little Fires Everywhere was written in unflashy prose that built a credible, specific world through the accumulation of patiently observed details. It packed a large number of characters into a tight, naturalistic space and forced them to interact, running several interlocking stories. Our Missing Hearts opts for a swooning lyrical style that dispenses with quotation marks the better to illuminate its major themes – racial oppression, motherhood, the redemptive power of story and myth – but is populated by barely half a dozen characters. Bird’s quest resolves very quickly, and halfway through the book, the only real question that remains is how far Margaret and the opposition movement are willing to go to challenge the regime.
Margaret, a freedom-loving poet, is clearly a descendant of Mia in Little Fires Everywhere, a freedom-loving photographer-artist whose passion and integrity expose the conformity and moral blindness of Shaker Heights. As a depiction of the clash of two value systems, Little Fires Everywhere was simplistic, reserving its sympathy only for those characters who clearly had the author’s approval – Mia, her daughter Pearl, the migrant Cantonese worker Bebe, hardworking Mr Yang. The book’s moral flavour of judgment and deserved comeuppances was too overt, but at least it depicted its monsters with brio: the repressed busybody Elena Richardson, the childless McCulloughs and the racist music teacher, Miss Peters.
Presumably, the brutal world of Our Missing Hearts is held together by a mixture of fanatics, timeservers and decent people who believe they’re doing the right thing. But the author doesn’t dramatise the machinery of oppression or attempt to present the viewpoints of its sympathisers. As a result, the dystopia feels underpowered and generic, and opposing it doesn’t seem as dangerous as it ought to. The parallels between the author’s invented world and ours are clear enough – banned books, enforced patriotism, attacks on racial minorities – but it lacks strangeness and specificity. It’s conscientiously rooted in today’s crises, but doesn’t take us any further. There are no imaginative leaps comparable to Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, Orwell’s Newspeak or Room 101, or the rag-bag troupe of players performing Shakespeare in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. As dystopias go, the world of Our Missing Hearts ends up seeming considerably less bad than life in, say, Xinjiang or North Korea, never mind Gilead or Airstrip One.
The book’s major theme is storytelling, as, deprived of his mother, Bird treasures the stories she shared with him: “Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians . The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world, why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin.”
In exile, Margaret’s work becomes a source of hope for the opposition and a collective memory for those who are suffering and silenced. “Telling the stories that those who needed to tell could not say, now grieving, now angry, now tender, a thousand people shouting through her mouth.” This sentence contains an allusion to Requiem by the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova – a reference that appears at multiple points. Like Margaret, Akhmatova’s work memorialised the victims of political terror, and Akhmatova lost contact with her only son, Lev, who spent years in the Soviet penal system.
It is a telling but uneasy parallel to pursue further. Lev eventually emerged and became a government-approved ideologue whose work is cited as an inspiration for Putinism. Such is the moral complexity of the real world – and the kind of unexpected twist that this book lacks. Our Missing Hearts, like Margaret, insists on the redemptive power of fairytales. And within their unambiguous moral worlds, happily-ever-afters are achievable. But in real life, we know that simplistic narratives are just as likely to be the road into dystopia as the road out of it.
• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng is published by Little, Brown (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
