I had read M John Harrison's science fiction before coming to this, and it took me by surprise. This is an England that is immediately recognizable (ice-cream cones and sea-side jollies, shabby digs, dirty and forsaken doorways, the aimlessness of broad and bawdy humour) but which is also a dark arrow shot from English yew into the shimmering metaphysical gold of a fictionalised Central Europe, that itself teeters on an imagined and glitteringly bejewelled Byzantium of the heart, mind and soul. The book is about friendship, loss, the operation of personal fictions in time and against time, the possibility of recapturing the past, and the pitfalls of imagination.But this is not a clever intellectual exercise merely (although the language is as quick, springy, clean and deliberate as the breaking of a green stick) - to read it is to undergo a realigning of one's spiritual frame.

This poetical book tells of Pam and Lucas, who the nameless narrator knows from their time in Cambridge. Something mystical happened back then - none of them remembers what, but whatever happened, left deep scars. There's also the strange Yaxley, who has something to do with this all.

Pam and Lucas obsess about Cœur, a lost kingdom, and the destinies of its heirs. There's also Pleroma, existing and not existing, yet worthy of plenty of effort to find.

The narrator observers the stormy relationship between Pam and Lucas, sometimes mediating between the couple. The book is full of mysteries and sometimes quite hard to figure out, but the beautiful language Harrison uses is worth the efforts. Mystical, yet enchanting book.

(Original review at my review blog.) ( )

Less gratuitiously unpleasant than Light, and I think much more successful. My central complaint about Light is that the spectacular disfunction of the characters is both too extreme in specifics and is trivialised by the too-clever plot that ties them together. In similar fashion the various characters of The Course of the Heart are variously damaged by an encounter with something beyond their comprehension, but where in Light they respond with murder and other forms of flagrant disfunction, in The Course of the Heart their differing breakdowns are less generic and more private.

Light only came clean about its plotline at the end, and in doing so made its themes relatively clear as well. We know from very early in The Heart how the characters are connected, but the specifics of their experience remains unrecoverable. The narrator is constantly chewing over and reconsidering theme, the stories he and his friends tell themselves to try to understand (and, increasingly desperately, to try to restrain and control) what is happening to them. But Harrison refuses to define the Pleroma and the events of their contact with it, and that mystical incomprehensibility is in the end far more satisfying than the neat-and-tidy resolution of Light. ( )