The Course of the Heart [Paperback]

M. John Harrison (Author), David Lloyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2006

John M. Harrison delivers an extraordinary, genre-bending novel that weaves together mythology, sexuality, and the troubled past and present of Eastern Europe. It begins on a hot May night, when three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Years later, none of the participants can remember what exactly transpired; but their clouded memories can't rid them of an overwhelming sense of dread. Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The seemingly least effected participant in the ritual (who is haunted by the smell of roses) attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An unspoken secret that warps the lives of three Cambridge graduates is a springboard into mysteries of the heart and spirit in British author Harrison's enigmatic dark fantasy. Lucas Medlar, Pam Stuyvesant and the novel's unnamed narrator are all middle-aged intellectuals mired in the entropy of their lives. Lucas and Pam are in a deteriorating marriage, and the narrator uses work as a refuge from family and friends. All three are beholden to Yaxley, a creepy acquaintance from their schooldays who shows up periodically, always speaking in metaphysical riddles about a sensual realm called "the Pleroma." Meanwhile, Lucas entertains Pam with a fanciful history of "the Coeur," a symbol-laden quest that spans centuries and continents and is linked to the understanding of the Pleroma. The meaning of the Pleroma and the Coeur, and how they relate to visions of awe and terror that taunt all three characters over the course of the story, are just part of the weird aura that cloaks all the novel's events and points back to a strange shared experience from their youth. Harrison (Things That Never Happen) tantalizes the reader with explanations that are always just out of reach, and this sense of imminent revelation heightens the tale's mystery and suspense. Readers who like fantasies tinged with the transcendent will find much to enjoy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books (April 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597800406
• ISBN-13: 978-1597800402
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,635,530 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Course of the Heart, July 5, 2008

By 

David Brookes (Sheffield, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Course of the Heart (Paperback)

M. John Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart, also featured as one of two of the novels in his compilation Anima, is one of Harrison's attempts to create a sense of magic and energy in a real-world situation.

The characters themselves are well drawn, existing in our world, or a rather dreary approximation of it. They are embroiled in a lopsided love triangle that crumbles, is reinforced, crumbles again, simultaneously drawing the characters together and pushing them apart. The sick and troubled Pamela falls desperately ill; her ex-husband Lucas struggles to reconcile with her, using a mutually-constructed legend to do so, as the first-person protagonist watches on. Frustrated by Lucas' indirect attempt at romantic appeasement and his own scabbed-over feelings for Pamela, he is drawn into the crumbling villages of English Derbyshire, which Harrison seems to have a strong dislike for, describing it perhaps not untruthfully as grey and depressed, mirroring the emotions of the protagonist and the feel of the novel overall.

It's not a wholly depressing novel; there are instances of humour, and the observations of the main character serve as welcome minor distractions from the story, which usually end up as opaque metaphors for the relationships between the three primary characters. A lot of the novel is metaphor, including the magic realism aspects I mentioned earlier. The first section feels like a short story, which in fact it was, in part, in his collection Things That Never Happen, which was itself an amalgam of his two earlier publications The Ice Monkey and Travel Arrangements. This shows through horribly, with a fast-paced, fantasy-feel mystery developing halfway in the first chapter, only to be almost wholly ignored for a hundred pages as Harrison sinks his teeth into the comparatively dull lives of his characters. At the end, the fantastical shared history of the three isn't even revealed, leaving the reader forced to find answers and satisfaction in the snippets of information provided earlier of a Heaven-like place called the "Pleroma", which was apparently punctured during a semi-forgotten magical experiment, leaving mad manifestations to pursue the three through the course of their lives.

This fantasy element is in fact the best aspect of the book, making a fascinating and delightfully mysterious read, but the great opening is let down by the rest of the novel. If only Harrison had devoted more time to the interesting metaphor and not the "real-life" complications of his characters, then the novel would be worth a second read. As it stands, the narrative is truly beautiful, extremely powerful and emotive without resorting to clumsy poetry. To read Harrison is to feel whatever he wants you to feel, but also in this case it means to sadly crave the better aspects of the story while making do with whatever Harrison wanted to concentrate on the time, which often feels like mildly irrelevant side-story.

If you like mainstream fiction with a dash of magic, then this is the perfect novel for you. If you were hoping for a plot revolving around one of those aspects of Harrison's wonderful imagination, like his genre novels, you'll be sadly disappointed. By Viriconium instead.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but Viriconium fans might be disappointed, February 10, 2007

By 

HJ Louw "Hermgerm" (South Africa) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Course of the Heart (Paperback)

I have always thought of M. John Harrison as a science-fiction/fantasy author, and although I know it isn't fair to label him as such, I still prefer it when he writes in these two genres, since he blurs the lines between them so well. The Course of the Heart also contains a blurring of lines, namely between our own reality and a fantastic otherworld called the Pleroma, which affects the four central characters in the novel. Even though Mr. Harrison's detailed descriptions and excellent characterisation does make the book interesting at times, something about it still did not live up to my expectations. Perhaps it was the constant alternating of the narrative between past and present events that confused me a little during the first half of the novel, or perhaps it was simply the fact that I loved his Viriconium books so much that I end up comparing everything he writes with these personal favorites of mine. This is the first fiction of Harrison's that I have read since Viriconium, and I bought the Course of the Heart after seeing it on China Mieville's list of Top Ten (Mieville being a favorite author of mine). Even so, it was not what I expected, but fans of Harrison's recent fiction ("Things that never happen" and "Light") might enjoy it. However, as a Viriconium fan, I still hope that Harrison will one day produce something that could, at least in my mind, live up to his earlier work.

One thing I should mention though, as one of the things that I particularly liked about this novel, is the incomprehensibility of the Pleroma that Harrison conveys to the reader. It was this feeling of strangeness, of a lurking 'otherness' throughout the novel that kept me reading and allowed me to follow the story through to its surprising conclusion.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, evocative, intriguing, sad -- a striking novel, August 9, 2006

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Course of the Heart (Hardcover)

_The Course of the Heart_ is a lovely book, but perhaps emblematic of Harrison's relative commercial obscurity. It is, it must be said, not terribly accessible. In the end it is beautiful and moving -- but it's hard to be sure exactly what was going on.

The narrator had apparently completed some mysterious magical act with two other young people during his university years. This act is never revealed (somewhat frustratingly) but it involved contact with another "plane of existence" (my words) called the Pleroma. It wasn't successful, and it seems to have mentally damaged the other two people: Lucas Medlar and Pam Stuyvesant. The narrator has perhaps (or not?) escaped unscathed. Lucas and Pam marry, but can never really settle, and eventually divorce. Pam is an epileptic, always difficult, and eventually gets cancer.

The story winds back and forth in time. The narrator spends some time involved with the sinister older man, Yaxley, who initiated the original magical experiment, and who is trying further experiments, including a vile act involving incest. None of the magic really seems to work, but it all seems to involve contact with incomprehensible things. The narrator also keeps in touch with Pam and Lucas, even after they divorce. His own life is conventional -- an ordinary, fairly successful, job; a sexy wife, a daughter. Things finally come to a head with Pam's cancer, and her decline and death.

Intertwined with all this is a travel narrative cum history of an imaginary Eastern European country. This is supposedly written by one "Michael Ashman", but we soon gather that this is all an invention of Lucas Medlar, with some degree of cooperation from Pam. This country is perhaps called "the Coeur" -- the Heart -- and it seems somehow connected with the Pleroma. It was destroyed by invasion, but in Lucas's conception, the Empress left descendants, who continued to carry some essence of the Coeur, suppressed for the most part. Eventually leading to -- of course -- Pam Stuyvesant. What does all this mean? I am not sure, but it rewards thinking about. I should add that the fictional Michael Ashman spent time in Czechoslovakia just prior to World War II, and patronized a Tarot-telling Gypsy whore, who surely died in a concentration camp -- thus bringing the central 20th century atrocity to the table. I don't at all know what to make of the novel, but it is beautifully written, very evocative, intriguing, erotic, sad -- a striking work.