Heart and Soul, by Maeve Binchy

The plot of Heart and Soul is essentially this: a doctor is given a limited amount of money to open a heart clinic that will emphasize lifestyle changes for heart patients.

Along the way, she begins to collect a number of interesting and lovely people around her, while coping with her two adult daughters and an ex-husband who's still adjusting to life as a divorcee.

There's also quite a bit in the book about her skill as a manager in obtaining things for the clinic from a number of people, including the hard-hearted, skillful political infighter hospital administrator -- the Dick Cheney of Ireland. In the end, you know she wins him over, too. That's our girl!

One of her friends at work is a hard-working Polish girl who wins everyone over with her eagerness and pleasant manner. When we finally learn her back story, we sympathize with her plight and admire her pluckiness even more. It's not very original, but it's very up-to-the-minute given that the rise of the Celtic Tiger meant that for the first time, the Irish at home had to learn to accept strangers.

This is the first book I read after I finished grad school. I really love Maeve Binchy, and so that makes sense.

Heart and Soul was not as exciting to me as some other Binchy books. I feel apologetic about saying I was a little bored by the excellent information on heart treatment. Some of the characters had been introduced in other novels (Scarlet Feather, Night of Rain and Stars, and probably Quentin's) and I recognized that they were familiar to other readers, who were probably delighted to meet them again.

I love that characters in Maeve Binchy's novels work, they think and worry about money, and they work hard (they're always terribly talented, no slackers or losers here) and take pride in their work.



I love Binchy's unflagging optimism and knowing but unassuming view of the world. I think her fiction reflects the big heart of the author. That's a quality I greatly admire. When I finished this book, I felt deeply satisfied.

The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White was one of the books that my online book club read this year.

This book was one I'd been curious about for a while. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre presentation a few years ago, and I knew that some folks feel that it's the first detective novel. One writer opined that it is not really a detective novel but an example of an extinct genre, the "sensation novel."

Wikipedia explains the "sensation novel" this way: "Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.[1] It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life."

Sure enough, The Woman in White does include adultery, theft, kidnapping, forgery, seduction and insanity. I don't think that there's any bigamy. Oh, I forgot, there is murder...and a fire! I suppose a scene with a fire, especially if it's a major plot point, should score extra points.

Some of the sensation of the novel left me cold. I found myself looking for something I could identify with and found very little. This is not really a criticism. My feelings about the novel are really a reflection of my personal taste, and as we know, "there's no accounting for taste."

The novel concerns itself primarily with one man (who's offstage for much of the novel) and two sisters. One of the sisters is a very strong person, and I find myself feeling that you could argue that she explodes the convention of Victorian womanhood by being strong and independent.

I found myself feeling a little uncomfortable with her characterization, however. Her only aspiration for herself was her wish to remain close to her half-sister. That certainly was consistent with the Victorian ethos. One of the villains of the piece frequently mentions how much he admires her yet he certainly sees her as a threat to his own plans. Is his admiration sincere? I think it is actually an expression of hostility.

The novel was serialized, as many novels were at that time. As a result, it's probably longer than it otherwise would have been (writers were paid by the word) and its plot might have been more cohesive had it not been serialized.

Wilkie Collins was not a conventional person. His father had been an accomplished painter. Collins had two mistresses and never married. That Bohemianism does not appear in the novel; in fact, the heroine rejects the man she loves to marry a man chosen by her father who has much more money (or is thought to--the perils faced by an heiress in the marriage market is a theme that makes an appearance here).

What I do love is Marian's character. She is brave. She is a realist. She does try to temper her realism with kindness and restraint.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I think I first began to be interested in Tana French as an author when I saw that folks at my library were reading her two earlier books, The Likeness and In the Woods.


I became more interested when I realized that she writes mysteries.




So I brought home Faithful Place as part of the usual stack of books I bring home but may or may not read.





I've just been surfing the web, and came across a short piece on Agatha Christie by Nicholas Blincoe.  He points out that Edmund Wilson criticized her work for its apparent contentment at remaining at the surface of things:  "Christie has no interest in dramatising the emotional impact of events on her characters."


The opposite is true of French's Faithful Place, and that's ultimately what I love about it.  Central character Frank's emotions are patiently dissected as they flow and change, as he reminisces about the past that resurfaces in the novel, his obsessive first love and his very complicated feelings about his family.


That is what I love about the novel.  That the novel is partly about coming to terms with one's difficult childhood, as well as the painful loss of first love and the difficulty of letting go, add to its appeal to me.  Frank's a plenty complicated guy; the world he used to inhabit so complicated that Frank considers at least four suspects for a recently rediscovered murder.  And, Frank is dynamic -- the action of the novel changes him by the end.  


Finally, French has an ear.  She has a gift for dialogue so lifelike that I found myself adopting some Dublin speech mannerisms. And the Dublin language she recreates here is especially vivid.