Where My Heart Used to Beat

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We have an exclusive extract available for you to read as well as some discussion questions for your reading group. Where My Heart Used to Beat There was a story about a man, some indignation, an attempt on my sympathy … but there was no connective logic and I tired of looking for it. It’s revealed that Céline has inherited her family’s mental instability, though conveniently it is the hyper-sexy sort of mental illness so beloved by film-makers and writers rather than the messy, disturbing sort of mental illness more common in real life.

Such an exploration of broader twentieth century history gives the book arguably its greatest passage. Faulks writes about wanting ‘a better, older Europe’ – one where the political shifts of the twentieth century- moving ‘from this world of tsars and kaisers and archdukes and kings’ towards today’s democracy- could perhaps have been achieved without ‘genocide across the century, tens and tens of millions dead, pogrom upon purge, slaughter upon holocaust, throughout Europe into Russia’. You can feel the author’s passion burning behind these words, bridling at the senseless killings of the past hundred years; you can feel his sheer and utter incoherence at how such travesties occurred. And it is this that gives the novel an added vitality – Faulks is saying that the past does matter, that we do need to examine it, and then, perhaps, we can learn from it. Correctly, I would like to think, he assumes that anyone who predicted the monstrosities of the twentieth century in 1905 would be taken to a ‘small but well-run lunatic asylum’. It is little wonder that Faulks called the span of this book ‘a century of psychosis’. Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks will be featured on the Radio 2 Book Club on Monday 21 September.

In the second stanza the speaker confirms that when he waits for his friend’s presence, he waits in vain. There is no longer a “hand” for him to clasp.” It, and the emotional stability it represented, has gone away. Lily Greenslade had a voice with a hint of the South; it rose and fell with a quizzical melancholy. She wore shoes with an opening at the toe, through which you could see a scarlet nail.

As the novel goes on, the narrative starts to flag. Potentially intriguing plot developments go nowhere. Pereira and his motives aren’t as dark or intriguing as they initially appear. The conclusion doesn’t feel as moving or as meaningful as Faulks clearly intends it to be.No: even that faint hope is then cruelly snatched from us, as it was from the poet, by continuing on to the next line and discovering that that ‘far away’ refers not to Hallam’s location but to the distant sound of the workaday world starting up again:

Their friends were also young, accomplished, and confident, or so it seemed to me. The music was getting louder, but I could still hear all right as I introduced myself to a circle of strangers and began that cycle of self-revelation and licensed curiosity. I didn’t like to tell people what I did because it seemed to unsettle them; I said I worked in general practice, and that was well received. Then I tried to steer the conversation towards less personal topics: a curious item I’d heard on the radio or a film that had just come out. She spoke English with an accent but quite naturally. When she had finished speaking, she looked down at her hands before daring to raise her eyes again and engage the rest of us with a smile. There was something about the three-part procedure that made you want to see it again. The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK. Annalisa was in her forties, a good-looking woman of apparent respectability, dressed in a smart skirt and sweater. It was not until my third visit that I noticed something in her eyes—a dreamy light at odds with the desk diary and the receptionist’s manner. While we waited for Dowling to free up the previous patient, I talked to her about work and whether she had a long commute. She had a pleasant manner and seemed keen to talk, as though not many people bothered to engage with her. At the end of another visit, I lingered after writing out the cheque. I discovered that she wasn’t needed by Dowling on Tuesdays and Fridays; I mentioned that I could do with an assistant in my private practice, someone to deal with paperwork, and asked if she would be interested. It is in the earliest morning that he makes it to the house and the door. This means that soon the darkness is going to lift and light will, at least to an extent, illuminate the “Dark house.”

Please forgive me for writing to you out of the blue, but I have something that I think may be of interest to you.