The Heart Broke In is a novel that just gets bigger and bigger, like a map being unfolded in a high wind.
James Meek introduces us first to Ritchie Shepherd, a former rock star who now produces a TV talent show but made a big mistake by embarking on an affair with a 15-year-old contestant. Meanwhile, his scientist sister, Bec, is studying a blood parasite which could turn out to provide effective immunity to malaria. She turns down a marriage proposal from a moralistic tabloid editor who, as it happens, knows all about her brother's under-age dalliances. Embittered by rejection, he tells Ritchie that he'll expose him unless he can provide dirt on Bec instead. She's not famous, but if her malaria treatment works she will be, and thus ripe for bringing down.
By this point, we feel we've got the measure of the story, but Meek opens up new vistas in which themes bounce off each other, mingle and come back at us with redoubled force and complexity. Ritchie's predicament is shuffled off to the side for a long time as Meek's characters struggle with the power of the biological imperative to reproduce, to plug into the unbroken chain that stretches back to the earliest forms of life. To remain childless, in this story, is to stand on the sidelines for ever. What does this mean to Bec and her new boyfriend Alex, scientists whose jobs involve manipulating and cheating nature? Are we fooling ourselves to think that we are so different from bacteria because we can tell right from wrong? In a novel which derives much of its power from the tension between betrayal, forgiveness and condemnation, a worrying number of these characters do believe they know right from wrong. Masterfully, Meek has all these balls in the air in time for Ritchie's inevitable return to centre stage.
While written with the accessibility of a mainstream novel, this is an ideas-heavy book that works on various levels: as a psychological thriller of sorts, a family saga and a meditation on a host of issues which, like the DNA in our cells, have never been put together in quite this way before.
THE HEART BROKE IN
James Meek, Canongate, £8.99
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