The Heart Lands by Richard BeckerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Heart Lands is a book of considerable length, many hundreds of pages I would guess, even though I was reading an electronic version. It was not until I was about a third of my way through it that I started to gain some idea of what it was about and where it was going. Despite this vague awareness I had to constantly refer back to the book’s blurb for reassurance about the multifarious plotlines. The reader is told that The Heart Lands is a love story, together with the good and evil that may result from the breaking of hearts. Unfortunately, I did not find much tender love, gentleness or even subtle caresses that could lead to passionate moments. There were plenty of passionate, even violent and often cruel, moments verging on the erotic (no pun intended!). And with regard to breaking hearts, apart from Sydney, Andrew Stone’s past lover, I had problems finding anyone sensitive enough to suffer from such a hurt. But while on the two subjects of breaking and hurting I can confirm that there was plenty of both in this overlong novel: the breaking of skulls, limbs, bodies and promises, and the obvious hurt that would accompany these.
The whole book lurched backwards and forwards between past and present, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, which is OK if there are occasional indicators of some sort to clear the reader’s confusion. But I had to constantly refer back to previous sections of the book to find a character’s name for this signposting, which was very annoying and slowed down the pace of the story. When I was sure that the “present” timeline lay in the 1990s up popped a few references to cell/mobile phones and I did not think that they were quite so common around that decade. However, I thought that the dialogue was very good and believable; that the action scenes were excellent and well written. In Andrew Stone the author has found a complex and troubled anti-hero who I wound up rooting for right to the end. Sydney, his hurt love interest, comes across also as a complex character and my sympathies towards her swung between anger and understanding. That was probably the nearest I came to actually liking any of the characters in this “epic” book. For me the book could have lost about a third of its pages, mainly because most of the content and characters covered “in the past” I just did not care about and could have done without. I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book so I could give an honest and objective review.
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