The Heart Broke In by James Meek

Times Literary Supplement 28 september 2012

The Heart Broke In, James Meek’s sixth novel, may resemble a nineteenth century family saga but its examination of morality in a post-religious society is thoroughly modern. Ritchie Shepherd, a now overweight and spoilt television producer was once the frontman of a successful rock band, The Lazygods. He lives what might at first appear to be a clichéd ex-rockstar existence with his beautiful wife, Karin, and their two children in Hampshire. He spends his downtime eating chocolate puddings and occasionally riding his adult tricycle in his study whilst his family gather plums from their orchard below. He has also been sleeping with a fifteen year old girl who had appeared on Teen Makeover, the rigged talent show he produces. This secret, if exposed, would of course put an end to his career and jeopardise his access to his children.

Meek convincingly portrays Ritchie’s self-delusion: he lies ‘only to protect his family.’ His self-destructiveness, nonetheless, seems to be genetic. His father, a Captain in the army, was murdered by Marxist Republicans in Northern Ireland for refusing to reveal the name of an informant. As a small child, Ritchie’s sister Bec had fantasies of self-destruction, or ‘daylight fears’, as Meek calls them. One of these was that the wind ‘would keep getting stronger until it smashed the family and their furniture against the walls.’ Even more bizarrely, she worried that ‘when the tap was turned off, and its mouth was open and dry and seemingly empty, something terrible was about to flow out of it, something that was not water and had no human name.’

She also has difficulty forgiving her father’s assassin O’Donabháin who, now a free man, has become a poet. Ritchie, on the other hand, is at peace enough with O’Donabháin to want to make a documentary about him. Ritchie’s motivation for this soon becomes clear: he believes in ‘a cryptic accountancy of darkness, that the public was prepared to tolerate a certain amount of balancing and rounding up between different columns where sin and suffering were concerned.’

Bec Shepherd is ostensibly as saintly as her brother is selfish, having devoted her life to finding a cure for malaria. She is so dedicated to this cause that she makes no attempt to get rid of a parasite which provides some protection from malaria and that lodged inside her during her research in Papua New Guinea. In fact, she even has the parasite named after her father. Her colleagues view her decision to remain infected as stubborn, given that there are other ways to protect herself against malaria and the parasite threatens to blind her. Its presence in her body will not even make much difference to her research as the parasite can easily be investigated in vitro.

She also embarks on an ill-fated relationship with a newspaper editor, Val Oatman. The characterisation of Val is fascinating but Meek’s obvious contempt for the kind of rightwing tabloid Val edits is often unsubtle. Stephanie, Bec and Ritchie’s mother, reads the newspaper in Spain and it fuels her belief that she left Britain ‘because it was rotten and decaying.’ In fact, she believes that the country is now squabbled over by ‘Immigrants, grasping bureaucrats, socialists, workshy spongers, amoral celebrities, trashy nouveau riche types, sexual perverts’. It is a rare instance in this wonderfully controlled novel, of Meek revealing what appear to be his own prejudices and unfairly weighting the balance against a viewpoint that is not his own. This happens again, more seriously, with the character of Matthew Comrie, the Christian son of a scientist. Matthew talks luridly of the‘Evil One’ but nonetheless reveals himself to be less than Christian; he receives some kind of comeuppance when one of his children discards her Christian faith. Matthew’s arguments in favour of religion are so overblown as to be almost immediately alienating and I would have preferred religion to be given a fairer hearing. This is a minor note of discordance, however, in an otherwise impressively balanced narrative.

Philip Pullman has described The Heart Broke In as a‘moral thriller’ and the plot certainly clips along at a pace, whilst Meek grapples with questions of ethics, responsibility and betrayal. Val, having been dumped by Bec, promptly goes mad and leaves the newspaper. He establishes a new company, the Moral Foundation, which blackmails well-known figures into betraying those close to them. The Moral Foundation slightly stretches credibility but on the whole, Meek is wincingly good when describing the media, particularly in a superb sequence in a drinking club in Soho. Ritchie and his friends are there to meet up with a disgraced friend, Bruce, who is still trying to justify having slept with an underage girl. Paranoia and cruelty ricochet in this scene, until the group abandon Bruce to go on to an identical drinking club, this one called Canaan.

Bec meanwhile meets Alex Comrie who is a cousin of Matthew’s and was once Ritchie’s drummer. Alex is now a geneticist, troubled that ‘It was one thing to talk about evolution but having children was the way to be part of it.’ It is the introduction of Dougie, Alex’s dangerous brother, however, which proves more interesting. Dougie works as a postman, is in debt to Alex and is unable to support either of the daughters he has fathered with different women. Like Ritchie, Dougie has an idiosyncratic approach to morality and he makes a moral decision which will effect the lives of all the main cast. Meek’s evocation of Dougie’s recklessness is both thrilling and touching. Ultimately, Dougie ‘was like a child who suddenly remembers that the ruins through which he is happily wandering are the ruins of the man he would become.’

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement