Heartbreaker [Paperback]

Susan Howatch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2003

The City of London in the 1990s is a dark, adrenaline-charged square mile deep in recession, where sex is just another commodity and keeping one's integrity is a daily struggle. Gavin Blake is riding high. He's up to his neck in money, sex and sleaze, but he's young, and handsome and he's making a lot of money. Carta Graham wants nothing more than to forget her life as a high-flying lawyer, so she's buried herself in a fund-raising project for the City Church of St Benet's. When she meets Gavin, she thinks the only thing they share is a temporary sexual attraction, but she's wrong. They are about to change each other's lives forever. For Gavin comes to see that in order to survive he must escape from the harrowing world he inhabits. His fight for freedom will be hard and fierce, but Carta, searching for her own freedom from the past, is with him every step of the way...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The heartbreaker of the title is a stylish and gorgeous young man by the name of Gavin Blake—a newcomer to Howatch's popular Church of England series. Set in 1992, two years after the conclusion of the last entry in the series (The High Flyer), this latest details Gavin's life as a high-class prostitute in London and his involvement with characters who will be familiar to readers of the series: Carta Graham, a well-heeled former lawyer; Nicholas Darrow, the charismatic rector of St. Benet's church; and the mysterious Elizabeth, Gavin's pimp-mistress with a shady past in the occult and New Age healing. Carta and Gavin meet when a friend of Carta's suddenly dies—and she discovers that he was a secret homosexual and one of Gavin's clients. As the story unfolds in parallel first-person narratives, the cocksure Gavin is shown in an increasing state of unraveling as his life is revealed to be less than the hip, bed-hopping blast he portrays it to be. Meanwhile, Carta—who fends off innuendoes from Gavin, despite her strong physical attraction to him—works as a fund-raiser for St. Benet's, where Darrow has played a crucial role in her psychic crash and spiritual recovery. As Gavin spirals into a breakdown, Carta finds herself increasingly connected to him—and to a dangerous underworld of sex and violence with links to her own past. As usual, plot improbabilities and long sections of spiritual musing are redeemed by Howatch's strongly drawn characters: if Carta can come across as brittle and prudish, Gavin's self-absorbed cant is continually entertaining, and supporting characters—such as the smoothly evil Asherton and tetchy but big-hearted ex-prostitute Susanne—round out the cast. Some readers may drop out during the final hundred pages (wherein Gavin recovers and finds the spiritual light), but this final book in the trilogy should satisfy fans who have been eagerly awaiting it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The latest entry in Howatch's series of novels investigating the juncture of the sacred and the profane in contemporary British life is set a little more than a decade ago in London's financial center, known as the City. Carta Graham, a former lawyer, had come somewhat unglued upon the death of her husband, and the good people at St. Benet's Church helped her through this life crisis. In turn, she now works for the church as its chief fund-raiser. An old friend announces his intention to donate a large sum of money and the fact that he is besotted by a person he's been seeing outside his marriage. When he dies soon after these proclamations, Carta discovers that the person he had been head over heels in love with is a male prostitute, Gavin by name. Carta and Gavin come to their now-recurrent encounters with considerable "baggage": both bearing marks of emotional damage from their pasts, and both nearly dragged down by please-make-me-whole needs. Can their mutual good works at St. Benet's bring Gavin the redemption he seeks and Carta the ability to forgive transgressions? The answer lies within the long but crescendoing pages of this psychologically complex novel about what it means to be a "good" Christian in today's world. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown P/B (November 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0751535508
• ISBN-13: 978-0751535501
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,967,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gay sex may be a tad too much for some tastes..., September 9, 2004

By 

William E. Adams (Midland, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heartbreaker (Howatch, Susan) (Hardcover)

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!

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back with the pack at St. Benet's, May 5, 2004

By 

Richard LeComte "richlec" (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heartbreaker (Howatch, Susan) (Hardcover)

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Page-Turner with Enormous Substance, June 20, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heartbreaker (Howatch, Susan) (Hardcover)

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