KEY POINTS:
It's the people who make Maeve Binchy's books work. Her sprawling cast of characters come alive thanks to their strong personalities - and sometimes a bit-part from one of her previous novels. This latest offering has plenty of echoes.
The Greek fishing village of Aghia Anna -
which was the setting for Binchy's earlier novel, Nights of Rain and Stars - turns up again, as does middle-aged Irishwoman Vonni, who in this novel is living on the island, running a B&B. Then there's the saint's grotto where girls pray for husbands and babies, that Binchy fans met in Whitethorn Woods, while much of the romantic action takes place at Quentins, the fancy restaurant from an earlier book of the same name.
Binchy's narrative voice is simple, almost naive. The tone, and some of the characters, remind me a little of Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Lady Detective series. But while McCall Smith's so-simple characters are ultra-smart, even gritty, underneath, Binchy's brand of homespun philosophers are down-to-earth Irish.
Several inter-threaded stories run through this satisfying 452-page marathon. Central are two women: the newly-separated Dubliner, Dr Clara Casey, who has just landed the job as head of a new Heart Care Clinic at St Brigid's Hospital, and the fresh-off-the-plane Polish girl Ania whom she hires and mentors. Both are good, solid types.
Clara is efficient, self-confident and a good enough business woman to outsmart chauvinistic hospital board member, Frank Ennis. Ania is young, totally unspoiled and the same age as Clara's daughters. Binchy gets the difference between the Polish girl who grew up with nothing, and her spoiled-for-stuff, Dublin-born contemporaries, just right.
Not quite so convincing is Eileen, the daughter of a drunken, violent father and battered mother who lives a fantasy: dressing as a society lady in shoplifted clothes (here is the unconvincing bit), trying to bully and trick Father Brian Flynn - the same priest who starred in Whitethorn Woods - into having an affair with her.
Knowing Binchy, both through her novels and even more intimately through her non-fiction manual for would-be novelists, The Maeve Binchy Writers' Club (Orion $32.99), I realise she will have researched her characters meticulously. Maybe we, who live in a largely irreligious country, have little idea about what priests and their parishioners can get up to?
Eileen disappears from the book halfway through, after a dramatic confession and exit, and I was expecting her to reappear, at least for a glimpse, near the end. But, it seems, we will have to wait for the next book for her to show up again. Binchy, who must be at the prime of her career, has enthusiastically adopted the newfangled, sliced-up structure favoured by modern novelists. She flicks between storylines like a gymnast on the swings of the high trapeze.
Indeed, some of her readers yearn for the good old days when she allowed her characters and sub-plots to develop as narratives. On the other hand, despite the title, Heart and Soul could never be called chick lit. The plot is too much like real life - untidy, with too many loose ends to qualify.
Nor does Binchy do steamy, rampant sex. What she does do is introduce readers to some thoroughly modern Dubliners, with believable predicaments, stumbling through life like the rest of us.
Heart and Soul
by Maeve Binchy (Orion $39.99)
* Carroll du Chateau is an Auckland reviewer.
