Rachel has known deep pain. Her childhood is shrouded in mystery, never revealed even to her stolid Quaker husband Antony. It is clear that she must've run away from a troubled life across the seas because of her North American accent and because of the way she refuses to even speak of her past. Antony, being who he is, rescues her from a suicide attempt while at college and brings her home to Cornwall to heal. She falls in love with the beauty of the place and Quakerism. They never leave his home, marrying in Quaker fashion and raising a family together.
Marriage does give Rachel some comfort, but it is plain that she still has difficulty coping with her moods. She is off her pills during her pregnancies, and it is during these periods that she is in the peak of her creativity, painting acclaimed abstract artworks that make her famous. She falls into post-partum depression in three of her four childbirths however, which the children vividly remember. They all learn to walk gingerly when around her, as if on eggshells. They find their emotional support in their stoic father, who keeps them all together.
When a more specific diagnosis is made of her condition due to medical advances, Rachel is relieved to live a more fuller life than she had ever dreamed of. The lithium helps even out her moods. But that had its effects on her creative life too; for having lived for so long with her condition, she is similar to a blind person suddenly blessed with vision who finds it hard to adjust to a new life.
Something had changed ... something had fallen away. Now that she had a diagnosis she was less of a victim and she became aware that her marriage had been founded on a vulnerability and an inequality that were no longer there .... Worse, she noticed a falling-off in her work and felt she now approached it coolly whereas her old turbulence had brought with it moments where she felt she was accessing a white heat of inspiration, something this new controlled safety had closed off to her.Mr Gale has the knack of letting you see the story unfolding for yourself rather than telling it openly. In the process, you get a more deep feel for the character and they stand out individually. Again, it is my opinion that he develops very strong protagonists and his secondary characters seem weaker in comparison, fading in the background. But to his credit, it works particularly well in this novel, because one can easily see that Rachel's forcefulness has had its long-lasting repercussions on her children. As Garfield, her eldest, confides his childhood stories to a stranger he meets in a bar when he finally meets his biological father, and sees with some surprise the compassionate tears in her eyes, he admits:
"I suppose when it's all you've known it seems fairly normal. Well, no. Not normal but ... acceptable."Petroc's death is particularly moving and its aftermath is not revealed to us in any detail, but its effect on Morwenna and the anger and hatred that Rachel bestows on her after that is palpable through all that is not said. So much so that, you feel yourself viewing the poor girl with pity and a hope that she too will find her rightful place in this world soon, putting an end to her ineffectual drifting at last.
Only after Rachel's death does Antony, while researching her background for an exhibition, finally learn the trauma she underwent as a young teenager that forced her to eventually flee to England. He gets a chance to meet with her long-lost sister who visits the grieving family for her own sense of closure.
The story has been put together beautifully. It is not a plot-driven narrative, which perhaps disappointed some of his critics, but more of visualizing the protagonist posthumously from the perspective of those people who were the closest to her. It is like looking at her through a camera lens, the angles frequently changing, so that though you may not get to the core of her being, you nonetheless get a complete picture of her, enough to be able to fill in the blanks for yourself. Each chapter begins with a little note on various personal effects that belonged to Rachel, clearly a part of an exhibition put together to celebrate her life, sometime after her death. The author corelates these notes with the story content, meshing them together cleverly. He admits in an interview that he had always wished to write about a difficult mother:
"I had a dim sense that the next novel was going to be about a family with a difficult mother ... led me to discover the amazing poetry of Anne Sexton. Sexton wrote with blistering honesty about her ambivalent relationship with her mother and her children and about the conflict between an essentially selfish creative genius and the selfless devotion expected by children as their birthright. Sexton was also bipolar."I find Mr Gale's books very comfortable to get into, though I doubt he would ever be a favorite author to me. His prose is simple but he manages weave sufficient complexity in his novels. It is clear that he understands his characters very well, endowing them all with distinctive features and voices. He gives them sufficient room to develop themselves. He even gets the voices of the children right, both when they are adults and when they are kids being treated on their birthdays with an exclusive day out with their moody mother or watching her sink in depression following the births of their siblings. In the end, each of them seem to silently scream, their life is all about their mother and her needs. The settings are memorable; Mr Gale brings out his places very well (like the Roundel in The Facts of Life), you can easily visualize them. His love for Cornwall shows clearly.
On the flip side, his books (at least the two that I've read) tend to sag in the middle. In addition, he puts in too many graphic scenes that are unpalatable and detract from the narrative, without contributing to the story one tiniest bit. Still, Notes from an Exhibition is interesting; one can learn something from his technique of putting a story together.
