Heartbreaker (67 page)

When one draws characters, you have to see both sides—their happy side and their dark side—their shadow side, I might say. In that respect, Gavin was no different from any other character, except that he had a very heavy shadow side. He was very damaged.

JMG:
The opening epigraph of the book, a quotation from
Mud and
Stars,
reads, “Our identity is being forged in the crucible of whatever sufferings turn out to be inextricable from the particular journey of each person . . . into fullness of life.” In what way does this shape the self-discovery that the characters in this novel embark upon? How do you think that suffering shapes a character, both in your fiction and in your real-world experience?

SH:
You should never seek suffering, but if it comes—and of course it will come, because we live in a suffering world—one should try and use it to find out more about oneself or about the world in general. Suffering can be a terrible experience, of course, but it can be redeemed if you feel that you’ve learned something and could put that into practice in your new life.

I think sufferings do teach you things. They alter your outlook and shape your character. One has to be terribly careful because of the sado-masochism angle; you never, ever seek suffering. That’s not how it’s supposed to be at all. But if it comes your way, then you can see how it can best be redeemed. The Christian theme is that God is always trying to redeem what goes wrong, so He would always try and redeem suffering in some way, and the crucial thing would be to try and perceive how He’s trying to redeem it. That’s all to do with redemption.

As far as the self-discovery of the [novel’s] main characters, it’s this business of the spiritual journey. One of the greatest journeys you can ever take, they say, is the journey inwards. The journey to find out who you really are. And from a spiritual point of view, if you think of yourself as a blueprint, of you being designed, your duty is to realize the blueprint. You have to become the person you’re designed to be. There are many things stopping us from being the people we’re supposed to be, of course—family situations, illness, lack of good luck. There are all kinds of obstacles in the way, but the trick is to sort of figure out who you really are. The more wholly yourself you become, then the more wholly in tune you are with what you’ve got.

God’s designed you to be a certain way, so if you become what you’re supposed to be, then life again becomes more meaningful and fulfilling. I’m sorry. I haven’t explained that very well, but it’s all part of the process of self-realization. It has to do with being lined up right with God. If you become the person you’re designed to be, then you’re not out of alignment with it. If you’re out of alignment with the person that you’re supposed to be, then there’s a vacuum created. There’s a sort of vacuum which has to be filled with the wrong things, like drink and drugs. You’re basically unhappy if you’re not the person you’re supposed to be, so the spiritual journey is about realizing yourself because you serve God best when you are yourself—as far as yourself as possible. But people mistake this for a sort of “me, me, me” kind of outlook. You don’t want to become yourself just to serve yourself; you want to become yourself to serve God, by being the person He’s designed you to be. It’s not a sort of selfish thing, it’s a thing you have to do to fit into the overall pattern that God has designed.

So that’s really the spiritual journey that Gavin undertakes. He’s leading a life that’s divorced from his true self, and he has to try and find out, really, who he is—and then to
become
who he is. It’s very difficult for him, because he’s so very adrift in a terrible situation. But of course, he gets this great clue when he’s dancing at the Savoy Hotel and suddenly he realizes what it’s all about. He has to be happy. He gets a glimpse of happiness there. So in the end, his sufferings are redeemed by the fact that he’s able to learn about himself and to forgive his parents—that’s the really crucial thing. That’s also part of the journey: to forgive others, to let the past go, to try and forgive. Forgiveness is very, very hard. And Gavin is finally able to forgive his father when he realizes that his father was also a heartbreaker. He’s raging against his father, and he finally sees that he’s no different from his father because he was a heartbreaker too. Because Gavin understands that, he’s able to forgive, and that’s a very big step forward for him.

JMG:
“We pick the roles we have to play,” Richard says to Carta on page 7. I thought the action verbs used here were quite telling—while Richard has agency (by
picking
), he has to (is forced to) slip on a certain mask in his life. What most interested you about exploring the tension between this façade people hide behind and reality?

SH:
I think many people have this problem. I’ve written on this topic before. I called the first Starbridge book
Glittering Images,
and it was all about how this young man sort of hid behind glittering images; behind that, he was actually rather a mess. But I think it’s quite common, especially with celebrities, in fact—you’ve got this glittering image, and the person behind that is perhaps quite lost and confused. And certainly with Richard Slaney, he was living a lie by choice. He figured that was what he wanted. In actual fact, the tension that was set up was so great that it killed him—he died young of a heart attack from the tension of his life. So it’s actually a great mistake to play a role.

In fact we all have to play a role to some degree, but I think it gets dangerous when it takes over your life and really chains you up, imprisons you. That can be quite dangerous. For Richard, really his mask always had to be in place and the tension was terrible. Someone who isn’t his true self, who’s trying to live a life that was not his true self, and the price he had to pay for it. So it can be a very stifling thing.

JMG:
You’ve said that Gavin’s language and occupation in the book has generated a great deal of controversy.

SH:
Oh, my goodness, especially in the church!

JMG:
I’m sure you got lots of letters!

SH:
It was a great variety, actually. People either loved it or loathed it, you see. I was worried about what my mother might think.

JMG:
And what
did
she think?

SH:
I think she was a bit bewildered!

JMG:
Why did you choose to pivot the novel around such a salacious character? How did you get into his mind-set? Were the passages dealing with his sex life difficult to write?

SH:
The first thing was to find out something about what being gay was like—although of course Gavin isn’t gay, but was operating in a gay world. Also, I had to find out what it was like to be a young man of twenty-nine. And so I got all the men’s magazines, gay and straight, and trawled through them all. It’s an education, I tell you! There’s always a book that tells you what you want to know, so I went to one of the big London bookshops and I trawled around and I found this book, which was like a gay how-to book. The basic research was all there. It just had to be dug up and assimilated, really. You may find this surprising, but it really was no different than researching investment bankers or clergymen or ministers. You just have to dig up whatever you can. You’ve got to have the background materials to draw on, so that Gavin can make remarks that sort of fit into the background. I found it deeply depressing, actually, to delve into prostitution, this very debased lifestyle. It did sort of weigh on me after a while. But I thought to myself, well, out there, there are plenty of people living like this. I mean, Gavin was a very upmarket prostitute, but there are a lot of prostitutes out there. And I thought it was somehow important that I understood, that I researched as much as possible to understand the kind of things they went through. But it was depressing.

JMG:
Did you find one aspect of his life the most depressing to write about?

SH:
It was the general miasma that was generated by Asherton and Mrs. Mayfield, the sheer awfulness. They took it in such a nonchalant way, so matter-of-fact, and made it seem in some ways so banal. That was the horror of it, and I think there was one point when Gavin finally found the videos of his predecessors being murdered. And he was imagining the video that might be made when he himself was murdered. And he pictured Elizabeth sitting on the sofa with a box of chocolates and watching it. And I thought that would typify the absolute evil—that she could sit on the sofa with a box of chocolates and watch a snuff movie! That was depressing. The whole milieu was depressing.

JMG:
Especially that Gavin was so besotted with Elizabeth and really viewed her as his savior.

SH:
Yes, that was depressing. But abused people often have a warped relationship with their abusers. That’s another very depressing thing, of course. But his self-esteem was so poor, he was just so grateful that he thought she cared for him. Very tragic. People with low self-esteem, that’s how they think—they’re just so amazed if anyone shows them affection.

JMG:
I was struck by a passage on page 337, after Gavin and Susanne dance at the Savoy Hotel, in which Gavin says, “I’ve been yanked away . . . by the memory of those precious moments when I was my whole self, infused with life and hope. I know now I want to feel like that again.” What steps does Gavin take to reclaim his life?

SH:
The important thing was to get him out of the situation that he was in. The first step was really to realize that he had to get out, that he had to end it, he had to escape. After that, it was a sort of more torturous process, because of course in a regular sort of suspense novel the story would end when he escaped from the villains. But that’s actually when the second part of his journey begins—because it’s so very difficult for him to build his new life after all he’s been through. He has that nervous breakdown, and all the rest of it. It’s very, very hard for him to claw his way into normality. With help, he manages to do it in the end, but it’s very hard.

It’s not an easy happy ending at all. He has to put right his relationships with his family. It’s the end of the beginning, and the beginning of a sort of new phase of his life. He manages to make it in the end, but it’s a big struggle. A lot of people, sadly, don’t make it into the new life. I’m thinking more of drug addicts: they go into rehab and they lapse, and then they go into rehab again, and they lapse again. It’s very, very hard to get out from under that terrible lifestyle, and I think it’s very hard for Gavin to build a new life. The first thing is obviously to tackle what made him become a prostitute in the first place, the reasons for his poor self-esteem—and of course, that all went back to his childhood. He had to be healed of all that past damage before he was well enough to begin again.

JMG:
Have you ever undertaken a similar journey of self-discovery?

SH:
Yes, in my early forties I did go through a time of great change. A sort of life crisis, really, where I sort of questioned everything and asked the classic questions: What does it all mean? What’s my life supposed to be about? What the hell’s going on? All that sort of thing.

People call that a midlife crisis, but actually it was different than that. It’s what spiritual guides call the second journey. A midlife crisis is all about when you reach a certain age, usually about forty or forty-plus, and you want to cling to your lost youth, so you run around like someone of twenty-five. Whereas in the second journey, which also can hit around forty-ish, you’re not interested in reliving the past at all. You’re much more interested in what’s going to happen in the future, and where your journey’s taking you. In fact, the first part of your life finishes, and you think, “Gosh, yes. Now what’s going to come? What’s it really all about?” Then you begin a second journey out.

The first journey is going out into the world and seeing what it’s like, and establishing yourself, maybe. And suddenly, it’s like changing gears—that phase is finished and a new journey begins. It can be a very confusing and difficult time; I certainly found it so. That was when I changed what I was writing, and I began to write my Starbridge books. They were the product of my second journey. They were quite different from my previous books, and of course the thing is that [the second journey is] also a very isolating experience—at least I found it so—because I didn’t really have the words to describe it. I thought I was going a bit crazy!

Very fortunately, I got hold of this dictionary of Christian spirituality, and I found this entry of the second journey, which exactly described what I was going through. So that was a great relief. And apparently, one or two other writers had it as well; Joseph Conrad had it. That was all very reassuring. I
have
had that kind of experience, and I think it’s very common. There’s not very much written about it, though, not nowadays anyway.

JMG:
You spoke before about how the trilogy revolves around three people who are outsiders in a way, going on their own spiritual journeys. Do you consider yourself a Christian writer? Are you writing for a Christian audience or a totally different type of audience?

SH:
I consider myself to be a writer who writes on Christian themes. That’s different than a Christian writer. I don’t see my job as to convert people. It’s God who converts people.
My
job is to tell a story. And I don’t go around trying to convert people to Christianity through my novels. That’s not what I’m supposed to do. That’s not my purpose. I’m supposed to tell a story.

I find Christianity very interesting. I am a Christian. I think it’s very intellectually appealing. It explores. It has things to say about the most interesting things in life—like forgiveness, repentance, redemption, renewal, life in general, really. I’m anxious to express that in some way, but I think that those so-called Christian writers have got a much bigger agenda than that. With me, the novel comes first and the Christian themes grow out of the novel, whereas, I think with so-called Christian writers, they think of the Christian theme and then tailor the novel to fit.