Kirsty Logan is an award-winning writer. She was born in 1984 and is currently living in Glasgow with her Girlfriend. The Rental Heart is a science-fiction short story, which takes place in the future. The short story is about a person, who, throughout his/her life, has to replace his/her heart every time he/she finds a new lover. The replaceable hearts are mechanical hearts, which apparently function like normal flesh-hearts even though the mechanical hearts literally shatter in your chest if you get heartbroken. The narrator of the story is a first person narrator.
The short story is told from a person, whose gender and name are unknown. The characters in the Rental Heart, including the protagonist, are indubitably flat characters. They lack description, complexity and substantial growth. We don’t even get the name of the protagonist. The protagonist is settled with a girl called Grace, which leads us to believe that the protagonist of the story is a male. But through a flashback we get to know that the protagonist has had different lovers including male lovers.
The fact that the protagonist has had male- and female lovers makes it impossible for us to determine whether the protagonist is a man or a woman. Kirsty Logan is in a relationship with a girl. The reason why she does not reveal the gender of the protagonist could be that it shouldn’t matter to the reader. Nowadays it is quite normal to be homosexual, and by not mentioning the gender of the protagonist, Kirsty Logan emphasizes that fact.
There are different science-fiction elements in The Rental Heart. The mechanical hearts, which can be rented from a heart rental place, is a science-fiction element. The mechanical hearts are inserted in the chest and can be used to contain the love and the memories from the person you love. The heart can be tuned to beat the morse code of your lover’s name.
If the heart is removed from the chest, the memories and love contained in the heart will be removed with it, but if you get heartbroken, the mechanical heart will shatter in the chest; Shards will then be stuck in the chest area. Kirsty Logan uses the saying heartbroken literally in this short story. When we use the saying, we use it as a symbol of being sad and depressed over someone we love, which sometimes might feel like our heart has been shattered, even though that is not case.
If the mechanical heart shatters a new mechanical heart can be bought if love is sought again. If love is not sought, the heart can just be removed altogether. This will result in a life without love. That is at least what the protagonist thinks until he has spent three years with Grace. When the protagonist falls in love with Grace, he makes his way to the heart rental place to buy a heart, which can contain her love and the memories of her.
After three years they are still together, and of course we expect the protagonist’s mechanical heart to be newly refreshed and working like a charm, because that is apparently how love works in that period of time. But suddenly the protagonist finds out that the heart model, which he/she carries, is defective. “The heart was dusty and tarnished and utterly empty. In the centre of it was no picture of Grace, no strands of her hair, no shine of memories, no declarations. The rusting metal squealed when I pulled it out. ” – Last page The protagonist actually opens his chest, where he finds a dusty nonworking mechanical heart.
It doesn’t contain pictures or memories of Grace. After examining the heart, the protagonist pulls out the heart. The fact that the protagonist loves Grace without the mechanical heart shows us, that real love cannot be adjusted or fixed through science. It appears to me that Grace is something special in the protagonist’s life. And even though the protagonist has been able to manipulate his/her love life earlier in his life through mechanical hearts, it is not possible with Grace, because she indubitably is the love of the protagonist’s life.
This leads us to Kirsten Logan’s message. I think Kirsten Logan is trying to tell us, that even though humans develop better instruments and better equipment through science every day, there are some things, which cannot be replaced by science. And one of those things is true love. Even if mechanical hearts are invented they will not be able to produce the same feeling, which true love can or true friendship as a matter of fact. True love and 1 / 2 true friendship cannot be fought or created with science it has to come and go naturally.