GILES EASTON, the counter-tenor at the heart of A Sweet Obscurity,
is rehearsing the role of Oberon in a radical-chic production
of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Puck’s
line from the Shakespeare source-play, “Lord what fools
these mortals be”, might stand as an epigraph for both
the gentle comic tone and the genial romantic plot of Patrick
Gale’s new novel. Like Shakespeare’s work it deals
in relocations. Where, in Dream, the mortals are transformed
in the forest, Gale’s arty Londoners are transported
to Cornwall where they discover both an alternative rhythm
of life and a healthier way of living.
At her mother’s death, Giles’s estranged wife Eliza
returns to her native village with her foster daughter, Dido.
There she meets and falls for Pearce, a rugged, middle-aged
farmer. Giles, meanwhile, travels to a festival with his music
agent girlfriend, Julia, to watch one of her clients give her
final public performance. Along with an eccentric cast of minor
characters, they play out a rich comedy of sexual and familial
confusions.
While poking fun at urbane, sophisticated metropolitan types,
such as one music agent whose “dark secret was that she
hated opera”, Gale displays the highest esteem for people
such as Pearce’s sister, Molly, who “radiated a
quality that had nothing to do with status and everything to
do with the uncomplicated acceptance of how life was”.
It is contact with Molly and her kind that allows even the
most jaded figures — notably the musicologist Villiers
Yates — to attain a kind of integrity.
There is a darkness in the novel but it never impinges on proceedings
for long. It is Gale’s generosity of spirit and Neo-Romantic
perspective that make his such a rare and welcome fictional
voice. (Michael Arditti, The Times)
Cornish cream with a hint of bitterness (12 April 2003)
Patrick Gale's novels have become progressively more difficult
to précis; none more so than A Sweet Obscurity,
his longest and most ambitious since The Facts of Life in
1995. Like its predecessor Rough Music, A Sweet
Obscurity is set
in Cornwall, where Gale now lives. It shares with that work
a fascination with untypical relationships and families. Equally
evident are the characteristic hairpin bends of storyline and
Gale's disarmingly relaxed exposition of malice, incompetence
and the human instincts of attraction and dislike. As in Rough
Music, landscape plays a distinct role. Again one is reminded
of Hardy - though also of interwar women novelists like
Ivy Compton-Burnett and Rosamond Lehmann.
Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source was narrated by 10-year-old
Rebecca, who described grown-up passions from a child's perspective.
Gale's novel revolves around a heroine of similar age, Dido.
Ever perverse, he bestows on Dido the maturity withheld from
her non-biological "parents" Eliza (actually her
aunt) and Giles. These have, in turn, separated.
Each becomes involved in a sequence of proliferating relationships.
The angelic-looking Giles is seeing Julia, whom he likes but
cannot love. He finally feels able to propose to her - not
when she becomes pregnant, but when she pretends to have lost
the child. Giles is disturbed by the sexual dreams he starts
having about stepdaughter Dido. An innocently meant but arguably
indecent photo he took of her develops an exceptional power
over him and the novel. Meanwhile, the more straightforward
Cornish farmer Pearce takes up with Eliza, just as her postponed
academic career looks set to propel her from the farm that
is his birthright and universe.
Lehmann and Compton-Burnett shocked their contemporaries with
brutal accounts of then-taboo subjects like homosexuality,
abortion and abusive parenting. Gale does likewise. Though
the paedophile theme may seem modish, it remains daringly off-centre.
Peripheral characters are typically well drawn - like
the bisexual, amoral rake Villiers. He provocatively tells
a dinner party he was "a filthy little boy", "gagging
for it" aged 10. Otherwise Gale's players are pretty much
all heterosexual, though unorthodox in taste. (There's the
usual run of girls dressing like boys). An exception is the
Elizabethan poet-composer Roger Trevescan, subject of Eliza's
studies and early victim of a gay smear campaign.
Contemporary classical music features prominently, as Giles
is a professional counter-tenor. Accounts of this tiny world
include a hilarious account of a "transgressive" staging
of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream. The director "had
toyed ... with the idea of naked boys, ones as near the illegal
age as possible, but abandoned that since none could be found
who were both willing to strip and able to sing treble."
The title of this 12th book by the prolific Gale (just 41 this
year) could not be less apt. The commercial triumph of Rough
Music leaves his name far from obscure - especially among
his legions of female fans. If some readers found his earlier
novels a little saccharine, A Sweet Obscurity provides a strong,
even bitter corrective. This is arguably his most questioning,
troublesome work. It amuses, startles and occasionally bewilders.
A Sweet Obscurity is worth every minute of your time. (Richard
Canning, The Independent)
A small girl called Dido — lively, engaging and convincingly
intelligent — is at the centre of Patrick Gale’s
intriguing and impressive novel. A shadow is cast over the
child’s life from the start. Since her mother’s
death in a climbing accident, which might have been suicide,
she has lived with her aunt, Eliza, who is haunted by fears
that the mother’s medical problems (at this stage, the
terrible details are only hinted at) might have been passed
on to the child. Gale writes about the complex Eliza with shrewdness
and sympathy. She dearly loves her niece, left to her care
as a baby, but she is lonely, short of money and lives in a
dreary London council flat; painfully honest, she acknowledges
how much she misses her time as an Oxford student researching
Elizabethan music. When the precociously sensitive Dido asks
when she was last truly happy, Eliza recalls, nostalgically
and guiltily, life before her sister’s death “thrust
motherhood” on her.
Their lives are complicated by the presence of Giles, who
shared a flat with Eliza in Oxford — he fell in love
with her, he admits now, when he saw her with the baby Dido.
He still claims, when it suits him, a paternal role in the
child’s life. A professional singer, a counter-tenor
who has parlayed his minor talent into a moderately successful
career, he is helped by his ambitious wife, an agent “good
at telling people they were wonderful”. Gale views the
fashionable couple with a sardonically amused detachment that
darkens, disconcertingly, when we glimpse Giles’s self-centred,
inappropriately sensual relationship with the child.
The novel is perhaps over-long, and sometimes seems too elaborately
and self-consciously plotted. The London story is interrupted,
confusingly at first, by chapters detailing the life of another
unhappy character: a Cornishman called Pearce who, after his
father’s death (probably suicide), has reluctantly taken
over the family farm and spends lonely evenings calling up
pornographic websites. Pearce’s eventual meeting with
Dido and Eliza seems at once predictable and contrived.
But Gale always writes knowledgeably and entertainingly about
music, whether in Giles’s career or Eliza’s research,
which is, to her surprise, revived by a visit to a madrigal
group in Cornwall. His greatest strength lies in his sensitive
evocation of those transient, often indefinable states that
reveal the truth about people’s deepest desires and discontents.
He explores, with tenderness and understanding, the unexpected
feelings that grow between Eliza and Pearce, and offers a memorable
study of a child forced cruelly, even tragically, to grow up
much too soon. (Margaret Walters, The Sunday Times)
