Heartbreaker (66 page)

THE HEARTBREAKER

A Reader’s Guide

Susan Howatch

A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN HOWATCH

Jennifer Morgan Gray is a writer and editor
who lives in Washington, D.C.

Jennifer Morgan Gray:
Was there a particular character, image, or idea that inspired you to begin writing this book in particular? What inspired the trilogy in general?

Susan Howatch:
Well, the trilogy in general kind of grew out of the Starbridge books—that was my previous series. I did six of those. They were about the Church of England in the twentieth century. While I was researching those, I came across the ministry of healing—it was something that cropped up and I got interested in it. It seemed to me to be closest to the ministry of Jesus himself; one thing that we know for sure about Jesus is that he was a great healer, and it seemed to me that this was an aspect of Christianity that wasn’t played up very much. I got interested in the psychology of it—and the general history and how it had a revival in England in the last century.

Then I spun off a couple of characters from the Starbridge books to start this new trilogy, this St. Benet’s trilogy. I already had two leading characters, Nicholas Darrow and Lewis Hall. That sort of started me off. I wanted to write a more modern novel, set in the early 1990s. And I wanted to write about modern London. A lot of my books have been set in the world of maybe thirty or fifty years ago—they’re not historical novels, but they’re not of today. I wanted to write something more up-to-date, and especially about London too (I’d not been living in London for quite a few years).

So this is what I decided to do. I thought it was a natural sort of progression from the Starbridge books into something different, but I didn’t want to write specifically about the church. I wanted to write about outsiders to the church, people who started off being either atheist or agnostic, and were kind of drawn in. So in the trilogy, each book deals with one outsider who’s drawn in and given the chance to have a lifestyle makeover, as it were. In
The Heartbreaker,
the third book, I knew that I wanted to have a male protagonist because the previous two had featured a woman in the central role. So it was time for a man. It was also time, really, to examine the sort of sleazy side of London. In the first book I had dealt with a respectable girl that had made good; in the second book I had written about a high flyer—it was even called
The High Flyer
—so I wanted to really get my hands dirty and do something rather different which would at the same time reflect modern London. The City of London is a very interesting part of London, being the oldest part—it’s the financial district today. It’s got a huge amount of money around it, and power, and of course there’s always a very dark underside to that kind of thing. I thought that I wanted to really explore the dark underside— someone who was preying on wealthy men.

It’s very strange about the central character, Gavin, because I can’t really remember how he got created. He was just sort of there in my mind. He just sort of happened. Sometimes it happens that way. Sometimes you can remember thinking of the character, and saying, “Yes, that might be an interesting thing to do.” With
this
character, he was just sort of there. One moment he wasn’t there, then he just floated in. He was very clear in my mind. I could see him very clearly. I’ve only had that happen a couple of times before, when they’ve arrived fully formed. Usually they have to develop and they change a bit—and evolve.

I had this overarching theme for the trilogy, that it would be about healing and about outsiders drawn in through healing. Three spiritual journeys, really, but outsiders being drawn through Christianity. When I started out, I didn’t know how the second book and the third book were going to be. I wanted a trilogy, and I knew that this was the central theme—the spiritual journey, health and healing and wellness mad how they would overcome problems and get a better life for themselves. I did one book at a time, really. After the second book,
The High Flyer,
I was ill for quite a long time. Then I was well for a few months, and then I was ill again. It wasn’t cancer, it was something really quite obscure. I’m well now, but it was awful at the time, because I couldn’t really do
anything
. It was a liver problem, and when your liver is on the blink, you can’t really do anything at all. So this book seems to be very jinxed, because I started it, then I had to give it up, and then I went back to it. It was a difficult thing, but in a sense I had the characters from the books before: Carta was carried over from the second book, and of course, there was Nicolas and Lewis. I did have the characters, so it flowed on from the first two. But Gavin was certainly quite new and he came in that interval after that second book was finished.

JMG:
What intrigued you about writing a series of interweaving novels that can also stand alone? What are the challenges inherent in that approach?

SH:
Well, I tend to think long! My early years as a writer I did very long novels. This way of doing a trilogy and thinking long appealed to me. The easy part [of interweaving novels] is that, because you carry forward various characters, it actually cuts down some of the labor. There are a lot of people there that you know already.

The difficulty is that it could be rather a hindrance; it could be rather a straitjacket. I had the setting, I had the overall theme, and that
could
be constricting to make everything fit in with it. So one has to tread a fine line. I always found it a positive thing, I always found it helpful for creativity to have a framework like that so that I know where I’m going and what I want to do. And I actually haven’t found it constricting.

With the third book, I carried forward a character I hadn’t anticipated carrying forward—that was the villainess Mrs. Mayfield. I had left her a loose end in the second book, to show that you never really stamp out evil; if you stamp out evil in one place, it crops up in another. So I let Mrs. Mayfield drift away out of that book, but I thought, “Well, I’ll bring her back and really nail her this time.”

JMG:
And you sure did!

SH:
Yes, I sure did. So that was why she came back—that was another strand that I wanted to do in the third book. So, in other words, it is challenging and it could be constricting. But I like the framework, the business of having to keep within certain parameters.

JMG:
Why did you decide to construct the novel from the viewpoint of two narrators instead of a more straightforward structure? What were the challenges of writing in two different points of view? Did you construct Gavin’s story first, and then Carta’s, or did you shape them in tandem?

SH:
I must tell you that this was a big challenge. This was very difficult, much more difficult than I thought it would be. I’m very accustomed to doing multiple narrations—in fact, a lot of my early books were multiple narrations, the story told by five or six characters. I was used to that sort of thing. In the Starbridge series, each of the six books is told by a different person, in the first person. I was used to different narrators.

But this business of having just two narrators, and having the baton of narration pass between them, back and forth, this was something I’d never done before. And I think I underestimated how difficult it was. It was very hard to keep switching, I found. I didn’t do all of Gavin’s narrative and then all of Carta’s narrative. I did actually go back and forth as I wrote. But it was hard—especially since their voices are so different. That was very hard.

The reason why I did it was because Gavin was living a very abnormal life. I contrasted that with something that was normal, something that was right. He was living this abnormal, rotten life, so we were really battening backwards and forwards between normality and non-normality. But of course Gavin, being very deep in his awful situation, couldn’t really see how awful his situation really was. He could adjust to almost anything, and he’d adjusted to all this. Since he wasn’t an attractive, appealing person at all in the beginning, it was important for the reader to have him criticized by the “normal” people, like Carta, to have the normal people say, “You have a problem. You’ve got poor self-esteem,” and this, that, and the other. This way, you get a continuous light shone on Gavin, to illuminate him and to signal to the reader that he’s a really damaged person and that he needs help.

JMG:
You’ve described this novel as “John le Carré suspense.” How was writing a thriller different than crafting the other two novels in the trilogy?

SH:
I was using the form of the John le Carré novel to say something about spiritual journeys and how people could get healed from their troubles and go on to lead better, more fulfilling lives. The le Carré suspense theme is illustrated by the role that Gavin is playing the role of a double agent, and is actually in great danger. This is why I thought of John le Carré. In the previous books, I’d been using the form of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller to illustrate the spiritual journey. It was really a device. So while
The Heartbreaker
is not a John le Carré novel per se, it’s using that form to say something else.

JMG:
Why do you reintroduce the character of Elizabeth
The Heartbreaker,
and how does she change from one novel to the next?

SH:
It was satisfying to take a swipe at Mrs. Mayfield again—and this time, to nail her. I thought if anyone had read
The High Flyer,
they would find it cathartic that Mrs. Mayfield got her comeuppance in
The Heartbreaker
. And that’s why I sort of picked up that loose end, and decided to go with it. And of course Mrs. Mayfield is rather different in
The
Heartbreaker
—Gavin sees her as a femme fatale, whereas in the previous book, she had the persona of a rather dowdy, middle-aged frump. That’s illustrating how evil can be multifaceted and appear in many different forms. She’s sort of difficult to get a grip on, and of course she’s always springing up everywhere—as evil does. So that’s why she came back.

JMG:
Other than pure physical attraction, why would Gavin compel Carta so much?

SH:
It was primarily a sexual attraction. I think that happens very often, that you get a completely mindless sexual attraction. It can be completely inappropriate and sometimes it can be very hard to knock it on the head, because sex is a very powerful thing. There Carta is, a lawyer with a steady boyfriend, and yet she felt this sexual attraction to this totally inappropriate man. I think that’s actually quite common, especially perhaps for high-achieving women. Maybe it’s because they put so much effort into keeping their personal lives in check, so that they can focus on the professional, that they are vulnerable to going quite crazy sometimes, having a sexual attraction like that. That was initially how Carta felt toward Gavin. She realized it was stupid, but it was so powerful that she was sort of at a loss for how to handle it. And then of course, the more she saw that he was damaged—a real person, a person with difficulty— the sexual attraction faded and she was able to see him as more multidimensional, more of a person than a sex symbol. Then of course, it gradually faded and she got the balance of the relationship right. But it was very hard for her.

JMG:
They become like family.

SH:
Yes, like brother and sister. That was what they were designed to be, but it was very hard to get there. Once they did get there, it was a very striking relationship, a deep friendship, really. I think they were sort of soul friends. Their paths kept crossing; it was meant to be. She was meant to help him—and, at the end, he helped her too. It was definitely a God-given relationship, if you want to put it in those terms.

JMG:
One interpretation of this book is that Gavin is the heartbreaker of the novel’s title. What other meanings did you hope to convey by calling the novel
The Heartbreaker
? By whom or what has Gavin himself had his heart broken, and how does this make him a multi-faceted, intriguing character?

SH:
There was an Elvis Presley song called “The Heartbreaker” in the late 1950s or early 1960s that I was very fond of—one of his early songs, very country. And the word heartbreaker crops up now and then in my books, so it must have lodged itself deep in my subconscious! I called this book
The Heartbreaker
because not only does Gavin break hearts, but his own heart is also broken. I think when people carry a load of unhealed pain, they like to unload it on other people. When Gavin was finally healed from his pain, which he suffered from his parents and the death of his brother, then he was set free from breaking hearts and laying his pain on other people.

I earlier said that Gavin had arrived fully formed—he was just there. The title was also there right from that moment. I thought that yes,
he
was the heartbreaker—just like that. That didn’t happen with the previous books, but it did with this one. It definitely came together. The title was always there, and sometimes it’s not that way at all.

Gavin’s heart had been broken, and that’s why he himself had had a broken heart. The pain he suffered, he was laying it out on other people. Rather like when, supposedly, if parents hit their children, then their children pass it on and hit their children, and so on. If your heart’s been broken you pay the world back by breaking hearts. It’s a sort of cycle.

When you have a character that’s been so damaged, one knows instinctively that they’ve obviously got a history of something being very wrong. So while I was doing the early drafts of Gavin, I was exploring his relationship with his parents. That was really a thread from the start. Also from the start, I had the idea of the brother who died young. That really came along with the character of Gavin, that was all part of the package. It got more developed, the more drafts I did, but basically I had the idea from the beginning—that he had this history of damage. We’re all damaged to some extent. No one is completely happy. And if they are perpetually happy, with no shadows, then there’s something wrong with them!