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.
JMG: How do you seek to weave the religious with the secular in your books?
SH: I’m very much opposed to Christianity being in little ghettos, because I think that’s quite contrary to what the spirit of Christianity should be about. Christianity is a very materialistic religion in the basic sense that it involves bread and wine and somebody who died a horrible death—it’s very real, it’s very here and now. And I don’t think it should be locked in a little ghetto, sanitized from the real world. I think Christ himself was out there in the real world, working away in what was, in his day, a secular world.
There shouldn’t actually be any conflict, so when I’m writing about the secular world—as I always do—I think one of the attractions of writing about the ministry of healing is that it really is on the forefront. It works in the secular world, and it’s right on the front line in the secular world, meaning there’s all kinds of people—of all faiths and none—and that’s as it should be.
I think it should be for everyone. I like to blur the line, because Christianity has to work in the secular world. It has to operate in the secular world. That’s what it’s all about. So I don’t actually see there’s a conflict. Although today of course, when we’re so used to Christians forming blocks and shutting out the world, perhaps, I think that’s sometimes quite an alien concept. I think Christianity actually should be in the secular world—relating with it and interweaving with it. That’s how I feel, anyway.
JMG: The concept of healing is explored at great length in the novel— both its positive aspects and the way it can be manipulated to exploit those searching for answers. What about a healing ministry compelled you to make St. Benet’s and its priests so important to the novel and to the characters?
SH: I came across it, as I said, when I was doing research for the Starbridge books. And then in the early 1990s, I went to a lecture given by a clergyman called Christopher Hamel Cooke. He was the rector of Marlyebone Church in London, and he wanted to turn the church into a healing center. I based my fictitious St. Benet’s Church on his work. He was very traditional from the point of view of being part of a Catholic tradition. It wasn’t Pentecostal healing; he was much quieter, much more low-key. I found this interesting. It had to involve people of immense integrity, because healing can be about power over vulnerable people. So healers have to be very honest. They have to keep themselves honest, work hard at keeping themselves honest and preserve their integrity. I felt that it presented such a challenge to maybe someone who’s such a good, gifted healer—but the temptations must be so great. As a novelist, that sort of setup interested me.
Then I investigated further, and there was another healing center I got interested in, another hospital called Burrswood. There were quite a few of them, actually, in England, practicing the traditional ministry of healing, the laying on of hands. It may be in the context of the Eucharist, but not necessarily, and it’s not charismatic in the sense that everyone’s shouting out and passing out. It’s much more low-key. It is very traditional and I think can be very effective.
And they always work with doctors, that’s the other thing. They’re not just out there on their own. It’s complementary medicine, not alternative medicine; it deals with the mind, body, and spirit.
Burrswood, the little hospital which I just mentioned, has clergymen and doctors working together. And the Marlyebone Healing Center, which Christopher Hamel Cooke founded, also has doctors and clergymen working together. So it’s an interesting combination, trying to deal with the whole person. Because you know how some doctors just think of people as bodies, and some ministers just think of people as spirits. But when you get the two together, you have a much better chance of healing. You can be healed but not cured; it’s not necessarily about being cured. You can have a healing of the spirit, even if the physical illness is not curable; a better quality of life and a better, sort of restful emotional attitude.
JMG: What about the manipulative side of some healers? For instance, when you take someone like Elizabeth, who, under the guise of one of her many identities, purports to be a healer, and then contrast her with Lewis or with Nicholas.
SH: Mrs. Mayfield of course is the dark side of healing, the exploiters, and the frauds that are just out for what they can get. They’re just out for the money. There are plenty of them around, that’s for sure.
JMG: In your opinion, what characteristics are integral for a good healer and minister?
SH: You have to work very hard in keeping yourself in touch with God. It’s very easy to go adrift, to do an ego trip. I think you have to like people, be interested in people. But also you have to be very well integrated with God. But it’s hard. There’s always such temptations. Pride and that kind of thing. It’s a dangerous ministry, in some ways. Very dangerous.
JMG: Do you have any special writing routines or rituals that facilitate the process and bring you inspiration and creativity? What are they?
SH: No. I used to go through techniques of getting up at 5:00 in the morning and having two cups of tea and doing this, that, and the other— but I don’t do that anymore. I’m too old! I don’t think there’s any special routine. I never write if I don’t feel like it, but usually I feel like it. There’s no good in making yourself do it. Nothing good will come out of it. I don’t have any magic moments, or magic mantras which I chant.
It also depends on which stage of the book I’m on. I like to work in blocks of time. I don’t do Monday through Friday. I maybe do two weeks straight and take a few days off to catch up. But of course, life is more untidy than that! I often do get interrupted. But there we are, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
JMG: Did you undertake a
great deal of research for this particular novel?
SH: Most of the healing research I’d already done, as it had come up in the previous books. I read through the books that I quoted from, Mud and Stars and A Time to Heal. It was mainly getting Gavin’s background, the practical details, that was my main research.
JMG: Is there anything in particular that you’re working on right now? What can your readers look forward to from you next?
SH: After The Heartbreaker, I thought I’d retire, but it didn’t work out! I’ve been published now, believe it or not, for forty years. My first book was published in 1965, when I was twenty-five. And so I thought to myself, forty years is enough, for God’s sake! But I really couldn’t get to grips with the thing, and finally, last August I thought, Oh, screw it! I’ll go back to work.
But I’m going to do something rather different. This time I’m working on a whodunit. A mystery. A murder mystery, so it will be very different. Well, not too different in some ways. More than that I’d better not say! It will be what Graham Greene used to call an “entertainment.”
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
The Heartbreaker is told from the points of view of two narrators: Gavin and Carta. How is this an effective narrative technique? How do these different perspectives impact your understanding of the novel? How are Gavin and Carta different in their personalities and approaches to life? Which similarities do they share?
Were you surprised to learn that Richard’s paramour was a male prostitute? Does Richard give any clues to Gavin’s gender, and if so, what are they? Why do you think Richard chooses to confide at least part of his secret to Carta? What about her inspires trust, not only in Richard but in others as well?
Why does Carta leave a high-powered job to become a fundraiser for St. Benet’s? How does she incorporate the skills from her law career into her new vocation? How is she well suited for this task, and what does she consider its most challenging aspects? What type of law career do you think she’ll pursue in the future?
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