Rough Music by Patrick Gale

This is the tale of two family holidays on a beach in Cornwall. It’s the same family, the Pagetts, but the holidays are separated by some thirty years or so. The narrative structure alternates chapters between the two periods. In keeping with a prevailing wind in literary fiction, it’s the story of how events from the past haunt the people of today and how time, whilst never a healer is, at least, a reasonably effective long-distance removal van. Even more effective, when it comes to removal of the past is Alzheimer’s, the illness suffered at the time of the latter holiday by Frances, the principal female character.

The main characters are the parents, John and Frances, and their son, Will. One of the unusual aspects of the novel is that there is no obvious protagonist, a shock-horror break with the rules of “creative writing”. Even at the end I was left wondering exactly whose story Rough Music  is, but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the book. The issue is complicated further by Will being referred to as Julian on the earlier holiday, and that was a little distracting. It appeared to serve no obvious literary purpose since it’s eighty percent obvious throughout the alternating chapters that Julian is Will is Julian is Will. Perhaps I’m missing something – please tell me. It’s not the only example of changing names in the book, but I don’t want to give away too much of the plot – more of that later. The answer to the who’s the protagonist? quiz is probably Frances and Will, or possibly the family as a whole. Apart from the main players, various other relatives turn up from time to time, including visiting the house where the holidays take place. Therein lies the web of diseased relationships that threatens to rip apart this seemingly happy family.

The book is executed with admirable skill and there’s little to carp about. The characters and their relationships and the setting are all depicted exquisitely, especially the poignant attempts at lovemaking by the repressed prison governor, John, and his romantic but naïve wife, Frances.

At every word you know you are in safe hands; Gale walks effortlessly along the line between well-crafted prose and showiness without ever overstepping. There’s nary a dull sentence, and the freshness of the language provided a lot of the entertainment value for me. There’s also a plot that is constructed to Germanic standards of engineering. Everything Gale mentions earlier pays the reader off later, making it the sort of book you want to go back and reread immediately, to revisit the characters in the early chapters with the benefit of foresight.

Plot is important enough to this book for it to be damaging to reveal too much. In fact, it’s odd that so much of the novel sets up the events revealed at the end, and so little of it is a close examination of how the characters react in those events. That’s another trend I've noticed in literary fic, that the major crises are shrouded while the daily lives of the characters are shown in stark detail. Maybe it’s not a fault, but it is noticeable. Maybe it’s a sign that the author, like so many of his characters shies away from direct confrontation with strong emotion, shrinking where necessary into erudition and culture and Britishness. Certainly the characters’ ease with music and art and literature left me feeling woefully uncultured. Without giving too much away, here's an example. John, faced with an emotionally charged scene that will change his life forever berates himself for being unable to show the passion of the moment. ‘He despised the pomposity of his voice, the well-schooled phrase, the Latinate syntax. Caesar, however, having subjugated the troops of the heretofore triumphant Vercingetorix and his slaves and his wives’ And, ‘His feelings were bound round with grammar that he longed to shrug off.’ It's wittily done, but is this just the character that we are talking about?