Book Review: Heartsound by Clare Stevens

‘Oh! Who can be ever tired of Bath?’ said Jane Austen. In the original sense of the word it is a wonderful place: the high-toned Georgian crescents, the scrubbed Roman mosaics, the Avon running gracefully under the Pulteney bridge. We find our thoughts drifting towards the town, now we’ve turned the last page of Nottingham author Clare Stevens’ new book Heartsound, in which the spa-town is the backdrop for a stirring queer-teen romance.

Stuck at home during the lockdown, heroine Chrissie looks back on her keepsakes from her salad days at uni, drawn back into bittersweet memories of a whirlwind forbidden love. Once we’re pulled back in time with Chrissie there can be no doubt of the decade  - gelled black ‘gravity-defying’ hair, Alice Cooper on the stereo, Cindy girls with a ‘penchant for pink’. This first part of the book is as ‘80s as Shakin’ Stevens or short-shorts.

A wide-eyed Chrissie is left starstruck by her Canadian coursemate Tara, whose apparent glamour and worldliness strikes a contrast with some of the more parochial friends she’s grown up with. Tara hits the university common room like a blonde interloper from another planet: ‘all the girls hate her and all the boys want her.’ Their relationship builds firstly as a friendship, Stevens taking an interesting route in developing it: grown-up Chrissie listens back to a tape of the pair interviewing each other for a Psychology assignment, and this proves an elegant and believable way for the two to begin sharing their inner lives with one another.

But this is not the era of rainbow-painted faces and Call Me By Your Name - homophobia, both casual and formal, forms what seems often to be an insuperable hurdle for our two leads. Their endearing, light-footed friendship begins to deepen, but it must do so in ‘clandestine meetings…sneaking away into the projection room’, away from Chrissie’s mates, who Tara calls neanderthals, and who are a bit more regressive than they would like to think. And Chrissie herself is wracked with mixed feelings, telling her own mum in no uncertain terms that she is not a lesbian.

Tension like this looms over much of the romance: Tara’s mum is ice cold in active disbelief, and an old flame is not far away - ‘wonder what she sees in you, little mouse’. As the social pressure ratchets up, a turn of events sees Tara’s face plastered up around the town, which is soon defaced by bigots - and circumstance tears them apart. The second part of the book, set years later, ends in a gasp-inducing twist, while the third circles back to 2020 and the lockdown, finally forcing Chrissie to begin to reconcile herself with the past.

Memory is key to this book: the way that a short glance can swell over time, the way that big adrenal moments cast shadows for decades, how feelings alter and persist. Above all this is a book jam-packed with soul, featuring a cast of lively, distinctive characters who you’ll feel that you’ve grown to know well. The queerness at the centre of the story is vital to its spiralling consequences, but it doesn’t assail you with moralising, preferring to let the substance of love remain the focus rather than the particularities of the form it takes. ‘They say we’re brave,’ thinks Chrissie, ‘but all we’re doing is continuing to breathe’. Sometimes that’s what love and determination looks like.