Patrick Gale
Rough Music
(Flamingo)

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Synopsis

Patrick Gale's fiction has been acclaimed as 'romantic', 'subtle', 'hip', 'brutal', 'superb'. This is his most assured, most accessible novel yet.
'Rough Music' is a family story, covering three generations, starting with and idyllic – though definitely strange – childhood, and ending in tragedy.

Julian as a small boy is taken on the perfect Cornish holiday. With the arrival of glamorous American relations emotions run high and events spiral out of control. Though he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian's world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. 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.

Biography

Patrick was born in 1962, on the Isle of Wight – the unplanned fourth child. His father was the governor of Camp Hill prison and subsequently Wandsworth prison, where Patrick remembers chatting to prisoners throught the windows of the mail-bag workshop and to trustees who were allowed to prune his mother’s rosebushes. Patrick’s mother too had spent much of her life on the periphery of prisons since her father was also a prison governor.

The family was musical and at the age of seven it was discovered that Patrick had a remarkable singing voice. He won a scholarship as one of Winchester Cathedral’s historic 16 Quiristers. They were educated in the cathedral close, alongside the Cathedral’s Choristers, in rather archaic circumstances. At the age of 13 he continued his musical studies as a day boy at Winchester College and his parents became stalwarts of the cathedral community. This ambivalent idyll provided ample material for his fourth novel, ‘Facing the Tank’. A keen singer still, he is closely involved with Richard Hickox’s cult summer festival at Saint Endellion.

His musical talents were further exercised with the cello and piano, but musical ambitions gave way to his obsession with getting an Equity card once he had spent most of his three years at Oxford neglecting his studies to appear alongside the likes of Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs in a variety of student productions. He was working as a singing waiter in a disastrous all-night restaurant when he completed his first novel, ‘The Aerodynamics of Pork’, on the back of his order pad. By the time his agent found a publisher for this novel, a second novel ‘Ease’ was finished so the two were published on the same day. By the time he was twenty-eight, Patrick had had seven novels published.

As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has contributed to various anthologies; written for television; published a biography of Armistead Maupin; written a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart’s piano and mechanical music for H C Robbins Landon’s The Mozart Compendium. Apart from the writing and the music, Patrick is a dedicated bridge player. He lives with his partner, a farmer, in Cornwall, and is as relaxed harvesting cauliflowers as at the bridge table.

Contributors Testimonials

Patrick Gale’s Rough Music follows one family’s response to sibling betrayal, marital infidelity and the gradual onset of Alzheimer’s disease, against a backdrop of prison warden life, a seaside holiday home and provincial life in middle England. The main drama takes place during two significant revelations within one family over two summer breaks, thirty years apart on the Cornish coast. The measured pace slowly reveals each family scret with typical middle class restraint. Unspoken resentments and repressed sexuality create a stifling, claustrophobic atmsophere that pervades every page. Especially affecting is the instinctive repression that the main protagonist experiences as he becomes aware of his sexuality. Tellingly, we follow his journey to find contentment within an oppressive and complex family unit from boyhood to manhood.

For me, the enduring theme of Rough Music is the focus on the effect and subjectivity of memory. The presence of Alzheimer’s disease highlights the neccesity of memory to enable us to navigate through our personal histories. The implications, complexities and ambiguites of subjective recollection infuse every element of the story, reminding us that each family truth is simply the interpretation of our own memories.

Paul Harfleet

There are few writers currently around who are able to probe beneath the skin of their characters with the subtlety of Patrick Gale. In this rich and evocative novel, Julian is forced to look back to his childhood to an apparently idyllic holiday in Cornwall that ended in tragedy. Julian finds he must reassess his life now and his role in the dramatic events of many years ago. Beautifully realised and dripping with atmosphere, Rough Music is a compelling read and established Gale as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Wayne Clews