by Patrick Gale
Your characters often suffer from depression and mental illness, and in many cases we see the huge impact of their childhood on them, particularly their relationship with their parents. What is your view of psychotherapy and do you see fiction as a form of therapy – for the writer and for the reader?
Psychotherapy and its processes fascinate me and I often cite psychotherapist as the job I’d like if I had to stop writing. But I’d never dare undergo it myself in case it cured me of my hunger to write fiction. On one level my characters are like patients and my task is to help them find their own way out of their dilemmas. I think the best kind of novels are the ones that take the reader on an emotional journey similar to the psychotherapeutic one. We learn about ourselves through empathy with fictitious characters. I certainly know myself a lot better through my years of writing – almost too well sometimes …
‘We learn about ourselves through empathy with fictitious characters.’
How important is your sexuality to you as a novelist?
It was very important initially as it convinced me, in the arrogance of youth, that I had a unique insight on love and marriage, which in turn gave me the confidence to keep writing. I’m rather more realistic these days and I’m so very settled that I’d have to go and do some serious research if I was to write with any precision about contemporary gay life. I don’t think gay people are automatically blessed with such insights, for all the claims made in various shamanistic faiths about true vision only existing outside the circles of reproduction. I do think, though, that being gay and having had a childhood where I felt neither flesh nor fowl for several years really freed up my ability to try on the different genders for size. I’ve never felt like a woman in a man’s body, but relating to men sexually certainly gives me an area in which I can be confident of conveying something of the female experience. I’ve always had close women friends and I come from a family of strong women – those two things have probably helped my writing as much as my sexuality, but perhaps they’re all linked.
Do you have a character with whom you emphathise most strongly in this novel?
Time and again in my books there seem to be characters, often old, often female, who stand outside the novel’s central circuit of sexual or familial relationships. And I suspect these are my way of projecting myself into the narratives like a sort of chorus, albeit one with dubious wisdom. In A Sweet Obscurity, it’s the tall, bald musicologist, Villiers, who we think is a baddy until the very end.
Your exploration of family relationships – between parents and children and between siblings – is at the heart of all your novels. How often do you fictionalise your own experiences?
I think I do this all the time, and probably never more so than when I convince myself that I’m making something up. It would be impossible to write about relationships – not just familial ones – without using the relationships I have or have had as my points of comparison. I may make my plots up, but the relationships I portray have to be based fairly closely on what I know (and know intimately) to be the case.
Even though you often present unusual family set-ups in your novels, and show the power of overwhelming sexual desire, you seem to uphold marriage and commitment too. Do you have a strong conventional side?
Oh heavens, yes. Like a lot of keen gardeners, I suspect that I’m a spiritual Tory, for all that I’ve read the Guardian all my life. I come from an immensely rooted and conventional background. My father’s family lived in the house they built for five centuries. The three generations ending in his father were priests and my father could so nearly have been one too. Both my parents were deeply, privately Christian and had a daunting sense of duty. I rebelled against this for all of five years in my late teens and early twenties but deep down all I ever wanted to do was move to the country, marry a good upstanding chap and create a garden…
Can you talk a bit about the importance of music in your life?
I so nearly became a musician. I was a very musical child and sent to schools that specialised in it, to the point where I couldn’t conceive of doing anything else when I grew up. First acting and then writing blew that idea aside, thank God, but music remains my magnetic north. I work to music. Every book tends to be written to a cluster of pieces which haunt my car’s CD player or live on my laptop and I find this a really useful emotional shorthand for helping me resume work on a novel if I’ve had to break off from it for a week or two. I have music going round in my head whenever I’m walking or cooking or gardening to the extent that I really don’t see the point of getting an MP3 player.
I also perform a fair bit. I play the cello in some local orchestras and in a string trio. I also sing (bass) and am the chair of the St Endellion Summer Festival in Cornwall – an annual semi-professional feast of classical music that features, in disguised form, as Trenellion in A Sweet Obscurity.
The importance of nature is a recurrent theme in your novels. Do you enjoy being outdoors?
I’m very outdoorsy and never cease to be thankful that I was able to marry a farmer and end up surrounded by fields and sky and clifftop walks and wonderfully dramatic beaches. I owe the outdoorsiness to my parents as they made us take long walks with them throughout my childhood and the habit has stuck. Not just walking, though. I’m really keen on botany and insects and birds and regularly drive the dogs crazy with boredom on walks because I keep stopping to look things up in guidebooks.
If you weren’t a writer what job would you do?
If I weren’t a novelist and couldn’t be a psychotherapist, I can imagine being very happy as a jobbing gardener. Nothing fancy, just mowing lawns and pruning rose bushes. Farmer’s spouse is a pretty wonderful position too, though. We have a herd of beef cattle and I love working with them.
Life at a Glance
BORN
Isle of Wight, 1962
EDUCATED
Winchester College;
New College, Oxford
CAREER TO DATE
After brief periods as a singing waiter, a typist and an encyclopedia ghostwriter, among other jobs, Gale published his first two novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork, simultaneously in 1986. He has since written twelve novels, including The Whole Day Through, Notes from an Exhibition and Rough Music, Caesar’s Wife, a novella; and Dangerous Pleasures, a book of short stories.
LIVES
Cornwall
Top Eleven Books
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin
The Bell
Iris Murdoch
Collected Stories
Mavis Gallant
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust
The Flint Anchor
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Collected Stories
Saki
About the Book
The Writing of A Sweet Obscurity by Patrick Gale
THIS IS THE only novel of mine to have been born out of a dream. I’d been living in West Cornwall for a while and had somehow been invited to join an informal group of singers who met every week or so to sing madrigals and Tudor anthems. One night, after an evening of singing and, I suspect, some especially strong Cornish cheese when I got home, I had an astonishingly vivid dream in which the group and I were singing a madrigal I’d never heard before. A lovely, yearning one, very still and thoughtful, about the rediscovery of love when far from the bustle of courtly life. I admired the piece and asked who it was by and was told, ‘Oh. It’s by Roger Trevescan.’ When I woke up I found the music had vanished but in its place I had Trevescan’s story – a talented Cornish composer obliged by a homosexual scandal to retreat back to his impoverished estate near Penzance
where he saved his reputation by an act of courage during the hostile Spanish ‘invasion’ of the villages of Mousehole and Paul.
As a rule I sleep deeply and easily but this was one of those rare nights when I woke in the early hours then couldn’t sleep again for the buzzing of ideas in my brain. I go through phases of keeping a dream diary, so had pen and paper to hand, and ended up scribbling down the outline of the Trevescan dream. Before I finally regained my slumbers I’d convinced myself I was about to embark on a thrilling change of writerly direction to produce a historical romance. With the dawn, common sense returned. The dream was clearly a farrago of recent events and local colour – my parents-in-law live in a hamlet called Trevescan – and I suspect Trevescan’s retreat to Cornwall from London was a dream version of my own happy decision to turn my back on the capital for domestic obscurity in West Penwith.
‘This is the only novel of mine to have been born out of a dream’
But the story stuck like a bur, the way plots sometimes do. I had no desire to change direction in my writing so just hoped it would fall off sooner or later. Instead what happened was I stumbled on an article, in the Guardian I think, to publicise a touring exhibition of photographs mounted to raise money for the charity Changing Faces. Changing Faces does marvellous work representing and supporting anyone with a facial or bodily disfigurement from whatever cause and the Guardian had homed in on a striking portrait of a young woman called Vicky Lucas with an obscure bone disorder called cherubism and persuaded her to be interviewed. She was quite extraordinary; frank, fearless and adamant that her face was a part of who she was and that the only problem, as she saw it, was in our absurdly narrow concept of what constitutes beauty and normality.
I immediately read up as much as I could about cherubism. I had never heard the disorder named before then but immediately realised, from looking at Vicky’s face, that I had seen someone with it previously without understanding what had shaped their appearance. And as has sometimes happened before, the act of reading up on one subject seemed to prompt mental connections with another and I found myself thinking of how Vicky might have been as a headstrong child and also of what it might be like to grow up as such a woman’s conventionally pretty but comparatively feeble sister.
‘I chose to tell the story from four viewpoints so as to echo the four musical voices of a madrigal’
And so the central motor of my plot took shape. I then found that the Trevescan bur had not been shaken off so resolved to combine the two. I decided to play with the madrigal and with ideas of the pastoral – of the countryside as a perceived idyllic escape from the city and the ironic contrast between that and the realities of country life as experienced on our farm and on those of our farming neighbours. I chose to tell the story from four viewpoints so as to echo the four musical voices of a madrigal (soprano, counter tenor, tenor and bass – some play is made, I seem to remember, of Julia’s low speaking voice and there’s a West Cornwall tradition of female tenors…). I also wanted to play with the idea that not one of those four voices can hear beyond their own line of music, as it were; that only Dido, standing in their midst, can hear and fully understand the slightly ambiguous madrigal their four lines make when woven together.
I often find that one of my novels is an unconscious reaction against the one I wrote before it. A Sweet Obscurity presents an interesting pairing with its predecessor, Rough Music. Both are fairly unconventional love stories, or love tangles, both are set in Cornwall and, in both, characters come to Cornwall and find their lives transformed by the experience in fairly unsettling ways. But whereas Rough Music is set in the touristic heartland of the county’s north coast, A Sweet Obscurity delves into the less obvious corners of this part of the world, the bits scarred by industry, the bits tourists tend to drive swiftly past. The one place where they overlap is in scenes at St Endellion’s Summer Music Festival – the Trenellion Festival as it becomes in my fiction – and even there the characters’ experiences are wildly dissimilar.
Read on
Have You Read?
Other titles by Patrick Gale
The Whole Day Through
When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since.
Are they brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness which fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?
Notes from an Exhibition
Gifted artist Rachel Kelly is a whirlwind of creative highs and anguished, crippling lows. She’s also something of an enigma to her husband and four children. So when she is found dead in her Penzance studio, leaving behind some extraordinary new paintings, there’s a painful need for answers. Her Quaker husband appeals for information on the internet. The fragments of a shattered life slowly come to light, and it becomes clear that bohemian Rachel has left her children not only a gift for art – but also her haunting demons.
‘Thought-provoking, sensitive, humane…by the end I had laughed and cried and put all his other books on my wish list’
Daily Telegraph
Rough Music
As a small boy, Julian is taken on what seems to be the perfect Cornish summer holiday. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.
‘Hugely compelling…Rough Music is an astute, sensitive and at times tragically uncomfortable meditation on sex, lies and family…a fabulously unnerving book’
Independent on Sunday
The Facts of Life
A young composer exiled from Germany during World War II finds love and safety in rural East Anglia only for tragedy to erupt into his life. In prosperous and esteemed old age, he must then watch as his wilful grandchildren fall in love with the same enigmatic and perhaps dangerous young man – and learn life’s harder lessons in their turn.
‘Gale is both a shameless romantic and hip enough to get away with it. His moralised narrative has as its counterpart a rigorous underpinning of craft’
New Statesman
Tree Surgery for Beginners
Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife-beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind. A darkly comic fairy tale for grown-ups.
‘The book is one of [Gale’s] best: a fluently constructed narrative underpinned by excellent characterisation. Running through it all is the theme of redemption; and the hero’s journey from despair to hope makes a stirring odyssey for the reader’
Sunday Telegraph
The Cat Sanctuary
Torn apart by a traumatic childhood, sisters Deborah and Judith are thrown back together again when Deborah’s diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith’s lover, Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters’ murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.
‘The Cat Sanctuary is a book with claws. It has a soft surface – a story set in sloping Cornish countryside, touching on love, families and forgiveness, delivered in a gentle, straightforward prose – but from time to time it catches you unawares. Scratch the surface, suggests Gale, and you draw blood’
The Times
If You Loved This, You Might Like…
Other novels touching on similar themes, suggested by Patrick Gale:
Cold Comfo
rt Farm
Stella Gibbons
Still the funniest satire of the country idyll. Pretty, bossy Flora Poste has a whale of a time reorganising her long-lost rustic relatives in the village of Howling and helping them adapt to the twentieth century.
The Water Breather
Ben Faccini
A nine-year-old boy’s view of travels with his chaotic, often overwhelming family in 1970s Europe.
Happy Accidents
Tiffany Murray
Kate Happy’s girlhood is anything but normal. Raised by her eccentric grandparents on their remote farmstead on the Welsh border, she battles to find out who she is and who she might become.