Review: It’s Just the Beating of my Heart – Richard Aronowitz

Richard Aronowitz achieved critical success with his previous, Holocaust-themed novel, Five Amber Beads and he moves in a different direction with Its Just the Beating of my Heart. I am pleased to say that his new book is a very fine novel indeed, with many layers of interest and a complex plot, which you won’t really understand until the end. At that point you will want to re-read the whole book to see the way in which the author introduces levels of dissonance into the story which slowly unsettle the reader and arouse suspicions about the reliability of this first-person narrator.

We read about failing art-dealer John Stack, whose wife left him on Christmas Day, taking their daughter with her. Life has now become that of the lonely bachelor, transformed into “single-Dad” every other weekend when daughter Bryony comes to stay for the weekend, at his lonely cottage in rural Gloucestershire.

John works in London four days a week at the gallery he owns in St James. On the fifth day he “works from home”, which as we all know is a euphemism for prevarication and long boozy lunchtimes. His gallery, once at the cutting edge, is now not so fashionable. Some of the young artists John supported have not quite made the grade and are now fortyish and looking for one last chance at an exhibition (which John finds it hard to refuse).

Bryony’s visits are the highlight of John’s life. He picks her up from the station on Fridays and delivers her back on Monday mornings. He catches glimpses of his wife, but somehow these are never more than fleeting, for she has decided to keep out of his life, and in any case, “we trust each other beyond words with our daughter but cannot trust each other with ourselves”. Bryony is still at the age when she is happy to go for long country walks with her father and spend low-key weekends, but all the signs are there that adolescence will soon put a stop to these intimate parent/child weekends deep in the countryside.

Poor John still seems besotted with his wife, and takes refuge in copious amounts of red wine which help him find the emotional oblivion he seeks. Her sudden departure on Christmas Day seems to have traumatised him, but can it have been as unexpected as he suggests? We find ourselves drawn into a set of mysteries, asking ourselves if John knows more about the anonymous phone-calls which end abruptly before they have really begun.

Views from Barrow Wake near Birdlip, Gloustershire

Before long, John meets a neighbour, a beautiful widow called Nicola, at a gallery in nearby Stroud. He is instantly attracted to her and finds himself taking a walk up to her house to see if he can catch another glimpse of her. They soon get together for tentative dinner-dates, and John finds out that she nursed her husband while he was dying of a tumour. Their relationship begins to develop over intimate dinners, although Nicola’s tendency to fall asleep on the way home takes some getting used to – but then John does seem to always order a second or even third bottle of wine.

John and Nicola are soon the main thing in each other’s lives, but there is a strange reticence on John’s part to be open about his past. He never mentions Bryony and pretends to be visiting friends when her visits come round. I began to wonder if John Stack is in fact an unreliable narrator. And are his suspicions about “to good to be true” Nicola justified or verging on the paranoiac? At this point, I need to stop describing this novel, for two reasons:

1. its rather good and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

2. The complexity of the plot and story takes off at quite a pace and it would be far better to read the book than my summarising.

Richard Aronwitz produces some fine writing. He has a great feel for the Gloucestershire countryside and John’s rambles through woodland provide an evocative picture of the steep hills of the Cotswold escarpment:

From the top of the escarpment we descend towards the bottom of the valley down a steep path; the trees thin out here, giving way to meadowland again and the clear sounds of a stream. We sit and rest on the trunk of a fallen tree, a great elm that stood, dead upright, for two decades following the the Dutch Elm Disease epidemic in the seventies, only to be felled by the storms that swept this part of the country in the late eighties.

Aronwitz writes well throughout, and the integration of story with location makes the book somehow seem very English. This is a quality book, and although there is little crime in the novel, the clever plot development reminded me rather of writers like Ruth Rendell or Frances Fyfield.

I love the design of the book. In an interesting author interview here, Richard Aronowitz said about the cover,

I proposed the idea of a sinuous line, which in my imagination represented the path through the woods between John Stack’s and Nicola Fenshawe’s houses. This sinuous line was transformed into police incident tape fluttering in the branches of a tree for the finished book-cover. My editor at Flambard worked closely with the talented artist, Andrew Foley, and fed back my comments and thoughts to him as the design took shape.

Having just designed a book cover myself (see my previous post) I can see that I was far more focused on the technical problems rather than the art and I would like to try again. In fact, Flambard Press have done a good job with the whole production for the book is printed on good quality paper with typesetting which makes it a pleasure to hold and read (what a loss for readers of e-books).

So, its congratulations all round, to Richard Aronowitz and also to Flambard Press. I hope this book sees some commercial success, and the writing is so visual I can just see it as a television drama, perhaps spread over two or three episodes.

Newspaper reviews: Christian House in The Independent

The photograph of Birdlip comes from flickr user jameshead