The Facts of Life -- Patrick Gale

To tell you the truth, it is the beautiful cover illustrations and the lovely sound of the titles that have made me pick up Patrick Gale's books.  The short summary of his stories too reveal some complexity, the kind you don't really encounter so easily in fiction.  To date, I've read two of his books, the first being The Facts of Life.

The story opens out in the years following the Second World War.  Edward Pepper, is a German Jew and a talented music composer who has been sent to England when a young child by his far-sighted parents to escape the brutalities that were unleashed in his native country.  He may not have experienced cruelty firsthand, but it has not really left him unblemished.  Suffering from tuberculosis, he is convalescing in a hospital where he meets Sally Banks, a few years his senior, and a doctor of his ward.  They are both taken in by each other and enjoy each other's company.  This culminates in marriage and they eventually move into a beautiful house called the Roundel which has been gifted to Sally by her mentor.

Things at first seem to be wonderful.  The marriage is idyllic on the surface.  Then subtle cracks in their relationship appear such as on the day Sally Banks first hears her husband's music -

Edward had never played her any of his music properly.  Once or twice he had started, but each time, abashed, he played the buffoon ... once he had mocked her ignorance, slyly launching into a delicious piece and only telling her after she exclaimed at its loveliness and his genius, that it was by Mozart.

She finally gets to hear his music played at a concert, but is jarred by the harsh sounds the instruments make and she is puzzled, thinking that the musicians were not following her husband's instructions properly.  On looking around at the audience sitting beside her, she sees other people listening to the music as if nothing were wrong.

Sally realized, with a sickening finality, that she hated her husband's music.  The sounds he had written had no discernible melody, no comforting sonority.  He had composed in an entirely alien language and she felt a mounting panic that he would expect her to understand it simply by virtue of their being in love ... she felt that a crude wedge had been driven between them ... she knew she would have to lie to him ... this music that was so central to his very being she knew she could never appreciate, neverly honestly admit to liking.

Ah!  She is in a position that an unenviable few might have experienced sometime in their lives.  This little lie that she tries to hide in her heart shows its ugly face when Edward gets an opportunity to compose music to the rapidly burgeoning movie industry.  She encourages him to branch out instead of sticking to his classic music and he feels betrayed when the truth dawns on him that his wife hates his music.  Composing for the movies is too easy a job and does not challenge him.  The birth of their daughter, whom Sally names Miriam after his sister in her ignorance of its effect on him, creates a further wedge between the couple, when Edward begins to feel neglected, Sally naturally being engrossed in her daughter's care.  Things go from bad to worse when he learns of the fate of his sister who had been left behind in Germany with his parents; visiting her in Europe he shocked at the spectacle of her and is driven to do so horrible a deed to save her that it affects him deeply, something he cannot confide to his wife.  He falls into depression that spirals out of control.  An attempt at suicide is botched and he is institutionalized for a brief period.  Just when he recovers, however, tragedy strikes when the countryside where he lives is flooded.  Here their story is cut short.

The second half of the book is devoted to the lives of Edward's two grandchildren.  His grand-daughter has shunned any form of personal life while immersing herself as a book editor.  His grandson, who once had had an ear for music just like Edward, is drifting to no purpose too, engrossed in one-night stands with strange men.  They both befriend a large construction worker called Sam, and by a quirk of Fate both of them fall in love with him.  The rest of the narrative is about how they deal with this complex development and what the grandson endures as he battles for his life, having been infected with HIV.

In an interview that had been tacked on in the pages following the novel, Mr Gale mentions that he had meant this book to be a trilogy about communicable diseases -- tuberculosis, STD and AIDS.  Perhaps that is why this novel has an air of abruptness about it, as if many sections were chopped off to reduce length.  Still, it is good that he decided to combine the entire family story into one novel, because I don't think the individual narratives would have stood up with a strength of their own.  I found the main protagonists, Edward and Sally, to be very strong and memorable.  Their relationship unfolded beautifully, but then there was an abrupt end to it that wrenched at the heart.  In contrast, the daughter Miriam (who is hardly ever present in the story) and the two grandchildren appear as weak and lost characters, and somehow it was hard to wade through their stories.  Having read another book by Mr Gale, Notes from an Exhibition, I feel this is a recurring theme of his writing - strong protagonists who stick in your mind with secondary characters that are colorless and fade away quickly.

In addition, he admits in his interview that a lot of the facts mentioned in the second half of the book with regards to AIDS might seem rather outdated, considering that he had written it in the early 1990s when the disease was still new.  There is truth to that as it made for very boring reading, the subject matter having been revisited in innumerable stories and movies since then so as to make the issue redundant.  He had meant the book as an educational ploy for the gay community at the time.  Perhaps that is the danger of writing a book like this in a rapidly changing world where technological and scientific progress now occurs in leaps and bounds; information grows stale very quickly.

His prose is rather simple.  Nothing memorable or quotable from his books.  Nor do I feel the need to re-read them in the future.  But his stories have some uniqueness to them in the way the characters develop and come together.  The main characters at least seem distinct and mature.  He bases many of the scenes on real places that he has seen and experienced.  It is clear that he himself has had a rather colorful and full life, though he has now ensconsed himself on his husband's farm in Cornwall.  He introduces interesting complexities in his books that do entertain the reader.  And that's why I will probably continue to pick up his books as and when I come by them.