February 24, 2011: Page Turners 7 p.m.

Book: Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy



Discussion:

This month the Page Turners discovered that our second book of the year, Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy, had a great deal of heart but seemed a little lacking in the soul department. The book received a decidedly tepid reception with thirteen group members voting thumbs sideways and only two giving it a thumbs up.

A few of our members had read Binchy before, and they all agreed that Heart and Soul was not her best effort. The novel, though not bad, and therefore not worthy of any thumbs down votes, displayed many characteristics of a cozy soap opera.

The foremost of these characteristics was the regurgitation of characters. It seemed as if Ms. Binchy was trying to be a bit Dickensian in her proliferation of characters. However, due to the lack of depth and development of these characters, she fell a bit short of a Dickens’ ideal. Many of the characters briefly mentioned in the novel are featured in some of Binchy’s other books. While this may have pleased fans of her complete array of work, for those of us reading her for the first time a few sentences detailing a non-essential character’s actions seemed a bit irrelevant.

The second characteristic which led us to describe Heart and Soul as a cozy soap opera was the overabundance of happiness expressed in the novel. Each character was so positive, nice, or forgiving as to render them unrealistic and the book underwhelming. For example, the twins, who at first were presented as typical irresponsible adolescents, went on a vocation-vacation to Greece and transformed into a focused, ambitious team of caterers. Declan, the new doctor at the clinic was in a near-fatal accident, but was cheerfully up and about, albeit with a cane, less than fifty pages later. Even the dramatically intended end of the book, when Fiona almost relinquishes her engagement to Declan due to issues concerning a prior relationship, fails to inspire any anxiety in the reader. By this juncture we had discovered the book’s inherent white picket fence nature, thus we knew everything would end happily ever after.

There were a few other improbable plot lines, which required some suspension of disbelief. The first of these involved Eileen Edwards, the woman stalking Father Brian Flynn. Eileen came off as being mentally ill, which we believe Binchy planned. Yet one Page Turner rationalized that she could not have been too ill, otherwise she would not have agreed to stop stalking Flynn when confronted by all his friends. Her agreement implied that she knew she was doing something wrong, which led some of our group members to question the notion of her being mentally ill.

The second improbable plot line was the underdeveloped love-hate relationship between Clara and Frank. For the majority of the book we heard about how detestable Clara found Frank, then, near the end, she begins complimenting him and socializing in such a way with him that a date appeared to be in their future.

Some of the Page Turners commented on the relationship between Anya and Mereck, her former employer. They thought this section of the book was the best because it had the most conflict. However, the details were a bit vague, so we wondered just how far Mereck’s maltreatment of Anya went.

As the meeting concluded we talked a bit more about romance in the British Isles, which lead us to a discussion of the upcoming royal wedding and remembrances of the wedding of Charles and Diana. As usual copies of next month’s selection were available for checkout after the meeting. We will convene again at the North Garland Branch Library on March 24, at which time we will discuss Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Swan Thieves.