The witchery of Sebastian Faulks's writing is that it appeals to women's book clubs while keeping a foot in the trench of academia. He has ignored the fact that the 20th century has been called an ironic age, and Where My Heart Used to Beat isunfashionably romantic, a novel about war, ridiculous love and lunacy.He has always had a raging passion for neurology and the human tic, and in this book the protagonist, Dr Robert Hendricks, is a neurologist who fought through World War 2. "I suppose it was the dynamism of these parts of the anatomy - the wires through which vital force had passed - that led me towards neurology," Hendricks says.There is a plethora of neurology: regression, amnesia, epilepsy and the nature of memory. Schizophrenia is a threnetic note, which winds the skein back and forth between genetics and organic explanations, never to be quite resolved."Something may look like a thought or feel like an experience, but may be a function of matter..." he writes. However, it seems that no analysis of the biochemistry or anatomy of the mind or memory enables Hendricks to accurately predict behaviour, particularly his own.He falls in love with an Italian girl, Luisa, when he is 23, dares the kitsch of ''one love in a lifetime" and is sufficiently confident to use that too frequently employed TS Eliot line, ''Humankind cannot bear very much reality." The lovers meet again only in their 60s when she is dying. He is a randy old goat but his sense of monk-like propriety appears at astonishing moments. Sitting in the bay of a tiny Mediterranean island where he has gone to visit a neuroscientist who has something to tell him about his father who died on the Western Front in 1918, a beautiful island girl arrives to dive for oursins (sea urchins) and strips off her clothes and offers herself to him. He turns her down.These acts of morality, so peculiar to the English, seem to be part of the disinterring reality of the novel.Throughout, it is Faulks's grammatical manoeuvres and word trickery that give a tragic leverage to the book, particularly the historically neglected trench warfare in Anzio in 1944, where the soldiers who fought were left brutally scarred.The protagonists are well tricked out with neuroses that seem to represent the author at full cerebral pitch, which makes them seem slightly unreal.Mental illness, neurology, and what the experts have to say about it, has over the years fallen into disrepair. Unlike Saul Bellow's heroes who lay themselves open to examination, many of Faulks's characters are prisoners of perception and there are times you want to bang them on the head and say: ''Get on with it."The book comes highly recommended because as we go into snip-snap writing and the cultural Balkanisation of the internet, Faulks's longueurs - the nibbling insights, curious resources and romantic thoughts - will become rarer.He is such a hungry observer of detail and the story is played out in such a minor key that it opens the door to unforgettable scenes.Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks, Hutchinson, R285..