Book review: The Stopped Heart makes little sense, in terms of plot or character
Julie Myerson’s new novel takes on serious themes – the death of children, mental breakdown – but ends up grossly inadequate to the task
by Julie Myerson
Jonathan Cape
Mary, the protagonist of Julie Myerson’s latest novel, moves with her husband Graham to a house that she senses has an unquiet history. This history, intersecting with the present in alternating segments, concerns 13-year-old Eliza, who lived in the house with her younger siblings more than 100 years before.
Through skilful clues we learn that Mary’s young children died in horrific circumstances. These are mirrored to an extent in the past narrative, which also deals with the abuse and murder of children. Myerson depicts mental states brilliantly: when Mary asks Graham if he ever gets lonely, he looks at her “with a relaxed kind of interest, as if she were asking him to think of his favourite colour or a number between one and seven”. “Love,” Myerson writes, in reference to a relationship that has endured more than most, is just “the smallest sliver of a so much larger, more complicated thing”.