Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.

A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father's Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.

The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.

Patrick Gale's latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.

(From Publisher).

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 sixteen Quiristers. They were educated in the cathedral close, alongside the Cathedral’s Choristers, in rather archaic circumstances.

At the age of thirteen 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.

A superb insight into the world of someone with mental health problems- haunting book, manages to resist being depressing.

This story about a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius, despite Patrick Gale's novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.