Customer Reviews

The Heartbreaker: A Novel

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but this book gains power and becomes quite moving by the time it ends. A hetero male, of course damaged in his childhood, makes his living servicing rich gay men. Circumstances bring him into the circle of St. Benet's Healing Centre, and eventually change many lives. Gavin, our hero, is not likeable at first, but he does grow on the reader as he struggles to understand his past trauma and present delusions. The female attorney heroine of "The High Flyer", the previous novel in this series, is also a major character, along with the ever-present clergymen Nick Darrow and Lewis Miles. If you liked "Wonder Worker" and "High Flyer" you'll like this one, too. If you are a stranger to the other novels by Howatch, I strongly suggest you read those two first. Her books feature continuing characters, who often grow and change in surprising ways from book to book. As good as the three novels in this current series are, I still don't think they are quite as great as the six books in her "Starbridge Series." Look up "Glittering Images" and "Glamorous Powers" and the four others in that bunch. I recommend this project to any reader of intelligence and taste and an interest in religion, psychology, and human behavior. It might take a few months to find and consume these half-dozen full-length stories, but the effort was well-worth it to me. Howatch is pretty darn good at bringing quite flawed people to life, letting their weaknesses almost destroy them, allowing Grace and their strengths to save them, and then in a later book showing them to be heroic in saving others from sin and despair. If such a plot description attracts you, start on her Starbridge novels at once. Save "The Heartbreaker" for next year!

Susan Howatch continues to surprise and amaze us with her series of books that probe the far reaches of Christianity and the history of 20th-century Britain, starting with "Glittering Images." This edition may be the most surprising of all, as about half is told in the voice of a rent boy named Gavin. Like all her narrators, Gavin finds that all his self-deceptions explode until all that's left is ready for the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. This is an explicit book, but Howatch has never flinched from sex -- after all, sex is a part of our life with God, and what can keep us from God. I was spellbound, Followers of her work from the Starbridge series will be delighted with the ending -- will the loose ends still dangling from the smash-up ending of "Mystical Paths," hinted at in "The Wonder Worker," finally be tied up? Anyway, Howatch combines the narrative inventiveness of a potboiler with characters we've come to love, particularly Nicholas Darrow, Carta Graham and the rascal Lewis Hall. One key plot point is a little obvious for people who have read her previous books, "The Wonder Worker" and "The High Flyer," but we can forgive her for that -- in a way it adds to our delight and enjoyment as we wait for the other characters to figure out what's going on.

Two short years ago, UK author Susan Howatch hit me like a ton of bricks. An innovative theology professor listed GLITTERING IMAGES --- the first in her absorbing and provocative "Starbridge" sextet about personal scandal and political turbulence in the Church of England --- as primary course reading. Yet no written or oral assignments on it were required. "Howatch will tell you more about our church and human nature than any textbook I could find," she promised, "and you'll enjoy a terrifically good read at the same time."

That insightful Anglican seminary instructor was more than right; she was (dare I say it?) prophetic. Being an inter-city bus commuter, it didn't take me long to crack open that first magnificent exploration of the inner lives of vocationally religious people and escape for miles on end into Howatch's unique world of knowledge and intrigue, set in a semi-rural venue inspired by the actual environs of Salisbury Cathedral.

By the time next term rolled around a few months later, I had wolfed down her five companion "Starbridge" volumes, and only the pressures of increasing coursework in other subjects kept me from continuing on to her next church-related series --- this time set amid the frantic secular intensity of central London's business district. Howatch's latest, THE HEARTBREAKER, is the third of this set, which independently carries on with the lives and loves of characters whose roots (and often, salacious secrets) are still anchored in not-so-fictional Starbridge.

Right off the top, I have to award Howatch full marks in THE HEARTBREAKER for courage, factual insight and sensitivity, as she probes the tortuously complex lives of high-stakes urban sex trade professionals (the British euphemism is "leisure workers") and their ruthless managers.

As with most of her novels, this story is told in the alternating first-person voices of two or more principal characters. And here, two is almost more than enough, for both Gavin (a pampered male prostitute) and sisterly Carta (who has just found Jesus and wants to help everyone) lead lives with enough convolutions to keep half-a-dozen people on the go.

Among those in the vocational "helping professions" (clergy, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and the like), spiritual healing is often compared to a long journey, one that begins before the traveler is even aware of his or her own internal cries for help. Amid the changes, challenges, betrayals and well-intentioned emotional blunderings of both Gavin and Carta, Howatch offers the reader a poignant and suspenseful fly-on-the-wall overview. She convincingly describes how the dedicated (and often voluntary) specialists in real parish healing centres patiently work to draw troubled people out of their emotional and spiritual entrapment and to face traumatic lifestyle changes upon which their very survival depends. Some don't make it, and Howatch pulls no punches in bringing us to a stark realization that her models are only too prevalent in today's society. (But don't worry...THE HEARTBREAKER'S ending is typically joyous and forward-looking.)

As with her previous titles, Howatch uses a vast knowledge of the Church of England (Anglican to Canadians, Episcopal to Americans) without a trace of self-indulgent pedantry or egoistic preaching. Her deeply layered characters are truly free to tell their own stories without tangential interference from an author who is so clever and passionate, she almost disappears.

The HEARTBREAKER leaves no doubt that Susan Howatch continues at the top of her form. It's an express train page-turner with the rare cargo of enormous substance, and I look forward to her next offering with almost indecent eagerness.

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch

I discovered Susan Howatch just a few years ago, and since then have read everything she has written. She is an incredible storyteller, and always was; but as her life-experience and wisdom have grown, her books have gone from flat (early in her career) to very, very multidimensional (at a peak with her Starbridge series and continued here.) I pre-ordered this book so that I'd have it when it was finally released, and I was not disappointed when I got it and read it!

Susan Howatch takes the reader into whole new worlds: the minds of each character and their perspective, the different philosophies and theologies and historical details that she researches and presents so seamlessly in her stories, and a view of Christianity that is a wonderful marriage of Orthodox Christianity in all its varieties with a full, modern understanding of psychology and sociology.

This novel will appeal to anyone who is bright and well-read because of the combination of a great story, well-developed characters, and a very intriguing view of the world!

Great characters that stay with you. It's been a few years since I read the last installment of her Church of England books, but I could remember enough about the characters to easily pick up the story in Heartbreaker. Gavin Blake calls himself a "leisure worker," and lives his life encased in multiple layers of denial. The two voices in the book are Gavin's and Carta Graham's (from High Flyer). The book is about sin, redemption, and Christianity as a path to that redemption. It's not a morality play, but an intense study in human psychopathology. Since Gavin's a prostitute who services wealthy gay men, there are lots of discussions about sex, but there's no explicit, graphic sex. Howatch is not a romance novelist. She creates interesting complex characters that need spiritual rescue - and get it. I laughed and cried reading this book.

This is a book that is unusually in this age, brave enough to confront head on the psychological damage caused by the sex industry and in a wider sense the sexual revolution. Gavin, the principle narrator is a male prostitute. Initially he portrays himself as an adorable, cheeky bundle of sexual relief. He describes his physical attributes and the attention he gives to taking care of them with loving detail. However, as the novel progresses and Gavin recounts the indignities of his life as an escort with an increasingly forced gaiety, the reader witnesses his gradual realisation of his emotional and physical enslavement in a manner which is truly heart-rending.

Hope comes in the form of an accidental meeting with Carta Graham a business associate of one of Gavin's former clients who was also damaged by Gavin's female pimp, the erstwhile psychic Elizabeth Mayfield. This meeting allows Gavin to finally see an escape route from his life. However Elizabeth Mayfield has exceedingly powerful and rather evil friends so the crux of this novel is whether Gavin will manage to extricate himself alive, literally.

It sounds trite to say this is a novel about redemption but redemption is its main theme. It is through the support and love of Rev. Nicholas Darrow et al., that Gavin is able to rediscover his worth as a human being from being valued simply as an attractive piece of flesh. The power of this novel comes from the dramatic contrast between the insidious but very 'grand guignol' evil of Gavin's pimp and her henchmen and the innate goodness of the characters in Nicholas Darrow's healing ministry. This contrast reaches its zenith in a dinner party conversation about the merits of Christinaity vis á vis the occult between Nicholas Darrow the charismatic reverend and Elizabeth Mayfield's principal ally, a very sinister character described by Gavin as a Westminster mandarin whose name escapes at present.

After the triumph of her Starbridge series, Susan Howatch's subsequent efforts at bringing her cast of clerical characters into the next generation met with mixed results with the unsatisfactory Wonder Worker and the better but still distracting High Flyer. But in this, her third novel focused on the doings of Fr. Nicholas Darrow and his circle at the St. Benet's Healing Centre in the City of London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Howatch seems to have rediscovered her voice and her center of spiritual gravity.

This novel focuses on two characters who tell their curiously intertwined stories in alternating chapters: Carta (neé Carter) Graham, the "high flyer" of the previous installment, and Gavin Blake, an up-market male prostitute who describes himself as a "leisure worker." Gavin is a lost soul, a man of confused sexual identity who has been brainwashed and manipulated by Carta's nemesis, the satanic Mrs. Mayfield, and her malefic accomplice, Asherton. After a chance meeting, Gavin and Carta embark on a reluctantly shared spiritual journey that results in Mrs. Mayfield's defeat, Carta's further spiritual growth, and Gavin's salvation. Joining them in combating the forces of darkness are, of course, Nicholas Darrow; his mentor and aide, Lewis Hall, who comes across as much less jaundiced and unsympathetic in this outing; and a cast of characters already introduced in the two previous works about St. Benet's and its environs: Alice, Val, Robin, and the Tucker brothers, Eric and Gilbert. Joining them are Sir Colin Broune, a client of Gavin's who proves to be a man of old-fashioned principle and morality, and Susanne, a former prostitute who turns out to be on an unexpected spiritual journey of her own.

Howatch tells a gripping story and, as always, her research into the Church of England and the Anglican way is flawless. What sets this novel above its predecessors is that in The Heartbreaker Howatch has created a set of characters about whom one can truly care. Structurally, however, the novel has lots of loose ends and unresolved sub-plots. For instance, since the essentially heterosexual Gavin is truly a "heartbreaker" who has left chaos and destruction in his wake, then why wasn't making amends to his many victims part of his spiritual rehabilitation. I hope it wasn't because they were (...) and less worthy of that consideration. If Gilbert Tucker, a paragon in previous parts of the trilogy, was on a course of moral destruction, what motivated his decline and wouldn't his healing entail more than a vague promise from Nick to have a chat with him? And just what precipitated Susanne's decision to link her fate to Gavin's, since everything in their interchanges until that point was rooted in contemptuous abuse? If Howatch had answered these questions and several others like them, this already good novel would have elevated.

I expected some "preachy" content-- but found nothing to complain about in this fascinating character-driven story of Gavin, a high-class prostitute with his hip, cocky self-delusion about his "ideal life". Susan Howatch does a great job of portraying Gavin's downward spiral into hell- and redemption.

The interaction between Carta and Gavin- actually- everyone and Gavin- is fascinating, with a few twists and turns that were unexpected. This book will have you squirming in your seat, sometimes due to the sexual content, sometimes the tense scenarios Gavin works his way through to escape the evil Elizabeth, Gavin's pimp. Elizabeth will do anything for the bucks- including hand her boys over to a butcher.

What the plot lacks- and it doesn't lack that much- Howatch makes up with her characterizations. Gavin is exasperating- and delightful- and sexy as anything. I'm not sure just how realistic Gavin is; after all he's supposedly a totally straight man -- not a bisexual, mind you -- working as a homosexual prostitute. But Howatch does a good job of convincing me it's the truth.

I found this novel good from start to finish.

A good friend tipped me off years ago to Howatch's Starbridge series of novels, and I've been reading those gems out of sequence over the years. I skipped over the two novels that precede THE HEARTBREAKER in this trilogy for no particular reason. (It certainly wasn't the dull cover art work that drew me to this one.) This goes to show that the individual novels, however linked, stand very much on their own.

I've always been deeply impressed by how well Howatch draws her characters and the local world of the Church of England in which they live; her novels speak clearly, articulately and meaningfully about faith, reason, and healing as well as or better than most writings I've perused, fiction or non-fiction, literary or theological alike.

The newcomer to Susan Howatch's work may perhaps find this novel to be something of a curiosity: explicit sexual situations (little graphic description of sex acts, however) and language combined with a pronounced Christian perspective. The overall theme is healing--a psychic healing--of a male prostitute, through the instruments of two priests and a bright, attractive middle-aged woman undergoing healing herself. It is a progressive view of the power of faith that Howatch brings to life, but a progressive view that is deeply respectful of traditional theological perspectives. She may not win converts to her novels from among the more fundamental Christians, and she may not appeal to those outside of a faith tradition. But for those with an open mind, and an interest in the Church, she will be sure to delight.

This novel has some loose ends, and it occasionally strains the will to suspend disbelief, but the strength of her writing carries the day. This is an enjoyable, even thrilling read, that in the end is meaningful: it is, in other words, a guiltless pleasure.

I am a longtime fan of Susan Howatch and have been eagerly awaiting "The Heartbreaker" ever since completing "The High Flyer" two years ago. Overall, I found it a great read (could hardly put it down!) and a satisfying end to what might be termed the Nicholas Darrow Trilogy. That said, I had some minor quibbles:

Carta Graham in this book isn't nearly as much fun as she was in "High Flyer". That's to be expected in some ways, I suppose, since in this book she's settling down in a new relationship; also, Howatch uses her disgusted reaction to Gavin's job to convey to the reader just how degraded he has become. Still, I would have liked a bit more sparkle to Carta. Also, in this book Eric Tucker (a compelling minor character in the previous book) barely makes an appearance. More Eric!

It's great to see that masterful villainess, Elizabeth M., make another appearance in addition to a new character: her sadistic pal Asherton. We know they're bad, but we don't find out just how bad they really are until the last third of the book. The suspense in this section is nicely done. (Won't say any more, as I don't want to give anything away.)

Some may find the last 75-100 pages of the book a letdown, but I do not. Howatch's brand of Christianity is nothing like the "Left Behind" series, as is clearly seen in the last section of the book which makes it clear just how hard Gavin has to struggle to succeed in his new life - even with the best support team in the world. I'd call this the best part of the book.

I hope Howatch carries on with this series: it's great.