Patrick Gale’s latest novel is the story of a woman he has called “my most frightening mother to date”. She’s a genius, a loving wife and parent, a faithful friend but she’s also tormented by bi-polar disorder and driven by an artistic compulsion - often barely distinguishable from her mental illness - to damage all who try to love and protect her.

Notes from an Exhibition takes its title from the information cards displayed beside works of art in a gallery or museum. Each chapter in the novel begins with a different example, all of them referring Kelly’s art or possessions. We never see examples of her work but it is described in detail and a cumulative effect of the novel is the reader’s sense that they are walking around a retrospective of her art.

Each chapter reflects in some way the object or art work that the curatorial voice describes at its outset, sometimes directly, sometimes in some enigmatic way. There’s a sense that the curator’s notes give us the official version, the art gives us another and the piece of narrative that follows yet another. The messy, human truth lies somewhere in between all three.

Roughly half of the chapters are told from Rachel’s viewpoint and these form the novel’s backbone, portraying key episodes in her life that take us to Penzance , to New York and to Toronto , from an idyllic afternoon on a Cornish beach to a nightmarish spell on a psychiatric ward. Interleaved with her story, however, are the stories of her sister, her husband and her four children, each of them giving a different perspective on this extraordinary woman, each of them seen both in youth and in adulthood.

What emerges is the intensely dramatic and complex history of one woman and her almost inhuman dedication to art but also a moving portrait of her marriage to a longsuffering Quaker English teacher and a study of the way her ambiguous gifts wreck emotional havoc within her family even after her death.

Drawing on the West Cornish settings Patrick Gale knows so well, it will please fans of his earlier Cornish novel, Rough Music, not merely in its depiction of a troubled family but in the exciting way it leads its reader to play detective with the assortment of narrative evidence laid before them.

Patrick Gale writes of the novel’s genesis: “As seems often to be the case, the starting point for this book was material that ended up playing only a small part in the finished narrative. In the wake of my father’s death a couple of years ago, I found myself spending a great deal of time visiting my widowed mother. The usual post-mortem business of recycling vast quantities of letters and drawers of old clothes escalated when she decided to snatch the chance to move from a flat which now seemed far too big for her to a perfect but much smaller house just around the corner. On the one hand I found I resented spending so much time away from my home but on the other I discovered that there was something horribly seductive about sliding into an elderly parent’s comfortable routine. In the name of filial duty I was putting my usual responsibilities on hold, my impatience dulled by regular, old-lady treats from M&S, nightly gin and nibbles on the dot of six, and a strange regression to a sexless but immensely peaceful second adolescence.

How this evolved into the longer novel and one about an artist is a mystery to me but I suspect the key lies in the happy accidents of reading. I happened to re-read Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar . That somehow led to my discovering and devouring the poetry of Ann Sexton. Somebody, possibly my sister, saw me reading the Sexton and recommended Kay Redfield Jamison’s study Touched With Fire, which explores the intimate links between manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and the artistic drive. These three stirred up all sorts of memories but especially ones of a sibling’s spells in psychiatric hospital when I was a child and of an intense relationship I enjoyed in the 1990s with Glasgow-born artist, Graeme Craig-Smith.

Graeme had always been open with me about his bi-polarity – it was one of the things that made his company so addictive and his long, long letters so extraordinary – but it made it impossible for him to commit to a relationship and would ultimately cause him to throw himself under a train.

I have never had any skills with a paintbrush or pencil. Compared to my brothers and sister I had the visual equivalent of a cloth ear and quite possibly turned to music to compensate for the shame art classes brought me. So to write a novel about a painter was always going to be a challenge. But I knew my heroine had to be a painter, not a writer or a musician, because if her skills were alien to my own I’d stand a better chance of conveying the sheer difficulty in what she achieves.

The complex personality of Rachel had already taken shape in my head, and I already knew she would end up working on the fringes of the artistic community of St Ives, when I quite by chance met an old friend’s mother after talking about my novel, Friendly Fire at the Cambridge Book Festival. I discovered that not only had she once taught, like Rachel, in West Cornwall School for Girls, but that she had enjoyed several rather scary encounters with Dame Barbara Hepworth. I had been fretting about the degree to which Rachel should interact with the real life painters of St Ives and Newlyn and, by writing her stories down for me, this kind woman gave me the key I needed, those few intimate physical details that would let me make Hepworth a sort of ambiguous demon in Rachel’s life, both inspiration and tormentor. Even in the 1970s the Cornish art scene was still very much a man’s club and women like Rachel and Hepworth who strove to hold their own and be taken seriously had to become a little monstrous.

(A similar quirk of fate would put me in touch with a fan of my work who just happened to have been a patient in Toronto ’s psychiatric hospital at exactly the period I needed to evoke in the novel.)

It’s a great shame that so few of the old artist’s studios in West Cornwall have survived without being turned into luxury holiday homes. A rare exception, hugely atmospheric even now that it’s a public space, is Hepworth’s which visitors can explore on a combined ticket from Tate St Ives. Her workshop, conservatory and tiny summerhouse are still much as she left them on her terrible death, the subtropical garden is surreally crammed with her sculptures and one gets a powerful sense, in the monastic, distinctly undomestic rooms in which she lived and worked, of the violence she had to do herself as a wife and mother in order to succeed as an artist…

Downloads
Fourth Estate has kindly made the first chapter available.
To view/download a PDF, click here.

Patrick has also made the second chapter available for
Galewarning visitors. To view/download a PDF, click here.