Frustrating but enjoyable

If we didn’t already know that Milan Kundera is one of Craig Raine’s literary heroes, then it wouldn’t be too hard to work it out from his first novel.

If we didn’t already know that Milan Kundera is one of Craig Raine’s literary heroes, then it wouldn’t be too hard to work it out from his first novel. As in Kundera’s later fiction (Immortality, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance), there’s the stark one-word title laying out the theme to be interrogated. There’s the same relentless erudition — so that even Raine’s two-page thematic scene-setter finds room for Dickens, Beckett, Auden and Henry James. More obviously still, there’s the same mix of straight narrative with essay-writing, fragments of autobiography and much learned editorialising about what the characters are up to.

But, as it turns out, you need more than just all this to match Kundera. After that literature-laden introduction, we get the tale of an elderly Englishwoman who once sailed to Chile to marry her fiancé, but was jilted at the quayside. From there, it’s off to American academia for the love affair between a disfigured lecturer and a poet, which prompts Raine to ponder the ‘poetics of crying’ — before we head back to Britain for a couple with a Down’s syndrome daughter. Next comes a solid piece of lit-crit on the role of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra.

Each of these elements works perfectly well on its own. Yet, the longer Heartbreak goes on, the clearer it becomes that one thing Raine hasn’t learned from his master is how to combine them into what Kundera likes to call ‘a polyphonic whole’.

Even as you’re being swept along by an individual bit of story-telling or scholarly speculation, there’s often the nagging question of what this particular passage is doing at this particular point in this particular book.