The Course of the Heart

Modern life is a condition where the goal is an escape from it. We are always trying to escape from ourselves into some other future. Decades of technological advancement appear to have created a strange, quasi-Victorian age, as we surround ourselves with projections, hallucinations, desires, and illusory trivialities.

This life is a life of dreams: a hall of mirrors, a funhouse. Light strobes cut the fog across unusual dimensions. Humanity, at present, is a collection of fractured identities, violently trying to assemble itself into something it can understand. It’s as if we lose some perception or knowledge of the world as we age, or it’s just an artifact of being human in the first place.

But alas, certain knots cannot be undone. There are demanding pieces of art that want to confront this condition, be it sounds, words, or images.

The Course of the Heart cannot really be said to be “about” anything if the intention is to describe a linear topology. Harrison’s work confronts life in an original and difficult modality of realism. Which means it’s a fleeting, often beautiful and painful, non-linear experience. There are moments in the novel that have striking wisdom and poetry; they would illuminate something in me, make an impression, and then, as I kept reading, dissolve. Life just kept happening.

Harrison can sum up an entire artistic movement in a paragraph:

The Expressionists chained to their mirrors — Rilke and Munch, Schiele and Kafka — never able to turn away or look anywhere else. A column of doomed and disintegrating soldiers in the long war against the father and the society he has created to imprison them. The mirror is not a simple weapon. It is their only means of defense, their plan of attack. In it they are allowed to reassure themselves: their nightmare is always of an identity so subsumed under the father’s that it becomes invisible to normal light, causing them to vanish as they watch.

So we are dealing with a serious intellect here: raw knowledge without pretension.

Generally speaking, the novel concerns three friends from college who, with the help of a sinister, likely insane sorcerer/witch-doctor named Yaxley, perform a ritual that is never explained or described. Further, the three friends don’t actually remember what they did, but it has landed them in a sort of cursed world, or perhaps a horrific form of transcendence.

The novel reads from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist who is concerned with his other two friends from the ceremony, Lucas and Pam. These latter two begin to invent a fictional world, an alternate history of a European country called the Coeur, French for the heart. Lucas writes the memoirs of an invented person named Michael Ashman who is looking for this lost country of the heart. In some sense, it’s a standard modernist gesture, a text within a text. But the passages of the invented Ashman made me want Harrison to write a whole novel around it — gorgeous.

It just needs to be read, if you’re interested in a serious confrontation of what you expect a story to accomplish. I think M. John feels that the expectation of something is an answer in and of itself. Do not look for any world-building here.

Harrison crafted an original piece of metaphysical angst that deserves to be examined, assuming one has the energy.