Call Maeve Binchy’s fiction what you will — literary comfort food, high-minded romance, Irish yarns with irresistible appeal.
Her newest novel, “Heart and Soul,” dares not stray from any of the above descriptors.
Binchy’s latest involves a fledgling health center in Dublin dedicated to heart patients. It’s merely a convenient epicenter for the endless stream of characters who run in, out and back around her story.
The author somehow avoids syrupy passages at every turn, but the crush of characters and plots eventually diminishes the novel as a whole. It’s as if Binchy couldn’t invest enough time in developing any one person or theme, so she bombards us with health-care professionals, bureaucrats and love- struck Dubliners as a distraction.
It doesn’t work, no matter how fluid the writing or heartfelt the impulses.
The novel’s pluckiest heroine is Dr. Clara Casey, a 50- something cardiac specialist chosen to oversee the clinic in question. The center is a smash from the day its doors first open, one of many ways Binchy avoids the kind of friction that might thwart her work’s reassuring approach.
Clara gets the most exposure in “Heart and Soul,” but she shares space with a veritable army of supporting characters. Declan, a shy-to-a-fault doctor, joins the clinic and instantly falls for co-worker Fiona. Young and confused Ania, a Polish immigrant trying to find a new home in the Irish clinic, can’t untie her mother’s apron strings. Clara’s ne’er- do-well daughter, Linda, thinks the world owes her.
Consider that but a sampler of the souls inhabiting Binchy’s “Heart.”
Naturally, love leaves more than a few breathless, but the heart strings are plucked without hitting a false note. If finding one’s partner were as easy in real life as it proves to be in “Heart and Soul,” the folks at might close up shop tomorrow.
A few threads connect the characters beyond the clinic setting, like a clever stylist named Kiki who can remove years from a woman with the snip of her scissors. But it’s their collective yearning for something more out of their current lives that unites them.
Binchy navigates their story lines with finesse, keeping sundry subplots separate and distinct. But they never add up to something bigger, something beyond surface platitudes. Perhaps in sanding away so many rough edges, Binchy removes enough reason to care how each character finds his or her own version of happiness.
And for a book maxing out at more than 400 pages, too many scenarios get resolved at breakneck speed. A key romantic hiccup in the novel’s final pages threatens to shatter the story’s good cheer, but the resolution requires less than a page of text. It’s hard not to demand something more illuminating from Binchy.
Still, Clara remains a marvelous creation, an older woman who slowly pulls herself from a sizable rut. Watching her rebirth, from the physical — new hair style, new clothes! — to her emotional epiphanies provides the book’s saving grace.
Nearly as good is the shorter saga of Father Flynn, a man of the cloth being stalked by an admirer. Again, just as Father Flynn appears at wits’ end, Binchy rides to the rescue with a literary lifesaver.
“Heart and Soul” is full of characters and colorful situations, dreams and stern realities. It’s also short on the kind of dramatic conflict that requires more than a paragraph to resolve.
Christian Toto is a Denver-based freelance writer.
Fiction
Heart and Soul, by Maeve Binchy, $26.95
