Memories of long-lost love and war
WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT
by Sebastian Faulks
(Hutchinson £20)
OUT of the blue, English doctor Robert Hendricks is contacted by an elderly French neurologist who says he served with Hendricks’s father in World War I and has some mementoes of him. He has read Hendricks’s psychology book and wants him to edit his own literary output.
Hendricks duly goes to stay with him on a remote island off the south coast of France.
During their talks, Hendricks finds himself unlocking his long-untouched memories of World War II — the bitter fighting, the loss of close comrades and, in particular, his passionate love affair in Naples with a beautiful, young Italian woman called Luisa — and then recalls his pioneering work with mental patients in the Sixties before finally confronting the horrors faced by his father’s generation on the Western Front.
Once again, Faulks returns to his favourite theme: the loss inherent in the gap between the life we have lived — and Hendricks’ turns out to be a lonely and, ultimately, unsatisfying one — and the one we might have had.
It’s that difference that tugs at the heartstrings. Faulks just gets better and better with every book. This is surely one of the year’s best novels.
UP AGAINST THE NIGHT
by Justin Cartwright
(Bloomsbury £18.99) SOUTH African Frank McAllister has made his fortune in England. He lives in fashionable Notting Hill, West London, and has a New Forest holiday home.
But, increasingly, he feels the pull of his birthplace, where he has a house on the coast near Cape Town.
He travels there with his Swedish lover, Nellie, and her teenage son and awaits the arrival of his daughter, Lucinda, from drug rehab in California.
In South Africa, he experiences not only the unsurpassed beauty of the country, but also the shadow of its often violent history — most notably that of his ancestor, Boer leader Piet Retief, massacred with his followers by the Zulus in 1838.
The holiday takes unexpected turns . . . First, Lucinda arrives with her former boyfriend’s small child, who has been abandoned by his parents.
Then, Frank’s Afrikaner cousin, Jaco — an unstable young man who has become a YouTube sensation for fighting off a shark attack — phones and claims he’s being held prisoner by Scientologists in the U.S.
Suddenly, what should have been an idyll has become a nightmare. As always, Cartwright draws you into his characters’ lives, the smug security of wealth undermined by the lurking threat of violence. This is up there with his best. THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES
(Scribner £16.99) RACHEL POMIE grows up in the early 1800s on the idyllic island of St Thomas in a strict community of Jews who have fled persecution in Europe, but she dreams of escape to Paris.
Always at loggerheads with her mother, Rachel survives, thanks to her friendship with Jestine, the daughter of the family’s maid. But her hopes of Europe are for ever dashed when, to save the family business from ruin, she’s married off to a much older man — a widower with three children.
Her future seems mapped out as dutiful wife and mother to her increasing brood of children — until her husband suddenly dies and she falls in love with his nephew, Frederic, newly arrived from France.
When convention deems the relationship incest, they risk all for love and flout the rules, leading to social ostracism.
Eventually, life turns full circle when Rachel finds herself at odds with her favourite son, who, as the painter Camille Pissarro, will be one of the founders of Impressionism.
Hoffman continues to mine the recent rich seam of form she’s found in this historical imagining of the great artist’s mother — it’s a moving and wonderfully engaging read.