Where My Heart Used to Beat
Books & Poetry
Accomplished British novelist Sebastian Faulks’ latest work is an epic story about love’s delusions and war’s insanity.
Perhaps best known worldwide for the film adaptation of Charlotte Gray (starring Cate Blanchett), Faulks is a king of elaborate stories. His fourth novel, Birdsong, was released 21 years ago, and is now a part of the British curriculum.
In Where My Heart Used to Beat, Robert Hendricks is a lonely psychiatrist in his 60s who can’t fall asleep without the aid of gin. He has the sense that he has always been separate from reality and true emotion, as if watching the world through a window.
After receiving an invitation from elderly neurologist Pereira, Hendricks travels to his home on an island off the coast of France to discuss his life’s work. Pereira pokes into Hendricks’ memories, opening the doors to a past he’d rather forget.
An emotional connection to the narcissistic protagonist is established only two-thirds of the way in, when Hendricks recounts his wartime tale of love and woe. But it may be too late for some, as the novel reads fairly dryly, unless you are riveted by trench scenes and the terrible cost of bravery.
Despite this, Where My Heart Used to Beat is an enjoyable thinkers’ novel which dives in and out of dense psychiatric theory, exploring ideas about trauma-related memory loss, and the evolution of madness treatment during the 20th century. Faulks’ beautiful phrasing and complex philosophies firmly places his work in literary fiction.
The author’s obsession with theories of consciousness in his earlier novels (2005’s Human Traces, and 2012’s A Possible Life) continues in Where My Heart Used to Beat, principally within Hendricks’ study of madness. But the real occupation of this story is memory: how we allow the past to define us; how our minds deal with traumatic memory; the way memories interact with our daily consciousness.
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While the novel’s structure is linear, Hendricks’ interwoven memories flit back and forth to different times, indicating the random, unbidden pattern of remembering.
As Hendricks digs deep into his past, he travels to locations that are exotically evocative: the night boat to Pereira’s isolated, rocky island, the train ride through perfect English countryside to visit an old friend, and a bittersweet reunion in a snow-covered skiing town. The novel embarks on a remarkable journey, both through Europe and through the psychiatrist’s interior landscape.
After reaching deep into his memory, and facing what he finds, Hendricks realises: “You can only be happy if you are open to your past.”
Where My Heart Used to Beat, by Sebastian Faulks, is published by Random House, $32.99.
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