Review: Rough Music

Rough Music, Patrick Gale

["Rough Music" by Patrick Gale (published by Harper Perennial 2009). A family story based around a Cornish Beach House.]

Rough Music, also known as ran-tan or ran-tanning, is an English folk custom, a practice in which a raucous punishment is dramatically enacted to humiliate one or more people who have violated, in a domestic or public context, standards commonly upheld within the community.

In this book no one escapes that!

This is quite a complex story spanning 30 odd years. And Patrick Gale teases the reader. He lets you find out for yourself.

We are presented with the human drama surrounding a family. The chapter settings alternate between current events, and what happened thirty-two years before.

Throughout this story there is mystery involving all the family members.

John and Frances Pagett and their 8-year-old son Julian spent a family holiday at a beach house in Cornwall decades earlier and the reader soon becomes aware that "something" happened then, that has effects on their lives today.

For his fortieth birthday, Will Pagett is given, by his sister and brother-in-law, a two week holiday at what turns out to be the same beach house. He invites his parents along, his mother now suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's. Wait up!.. Who is Will?

I add this following note, not as a spoiler to the story, but as a clarification to a point that confused our readers. No doubt Patrick Gale did this for his own dramatic purposes and by telling, I am probably going against his wishes and I apologise for that, but here it is... Will is what Julian calls himself now!. Not much in itself but the insight that Patrick shows by changing the name is just one detail but he does it over and over again, details that make the whole book so readable. PG says that this book is more autobiographical than his others, maybe this why it is so riveting. But does Julian/Will have a sister?

This is a fascinating look at complex relationships between parent and child, siblings, couples and lovers, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual. And added to the mix, all and anyone’s reaction to someone losing their mind. I was going to say memory, but dementia and Alzheimer’s is more than that, somehow the complexity that makes up the human spirit, is eroded and the person diminishes.

So when Frances has an outburst, this is not just a memory loss and frustration but almost a sign of a loss of humanity. So how do others react? I will leave you to find out for yourself.

We are told the facts. But the circumstances are only revealed in small pieces. It is a little confusing if you let it be, just read through, all will gradually become clear and there is a little satisfaction when you are finally told outright, you say.... well! I knew that!

As I said everyone was either a betrayer, betrayed, or both. But out of it all comes a calm. It will be all right in the end.

Will’s father was a prison governor and he and Frances married not so much for love but for social acceptance, this is what you were supposed to do at that time. Only later did love arrive and that could be for the wrong person.

This bald outline of the plot might lead you to suppose that it the plot is contrived. Maybe, but believable. I could relate to the attitudes of the age, the repression of thought and feelings. You might ask would it have been better if it had all just stayed hidden. Well I asked myself that and came to the conclusion that I had no idea! No that is not true, if everything had been in the open earlier, everyone could have moved on and perhaps have had happier lives earlier. Maybe.

Will's family goes through two crises, one when he is a boy and one in the present when he is in his forties. He, his father and his mother are all given a voice by the author. Events in the story are narrated by each of them so you get an idea of how each perceived the events and what their reactions were. We come to understand motives and keep hoping that there will be more communication but knowing that is not their way. A lot of repressed emotions and a lot of sensibility of the others feelings. Although the topics are charged, the treatment is careful and caring so that we come away with a sense of empathy for all the characters, regardless of their flaws.

The characters are well drawn. I could see my Mum and Dad and an image of myself.

There is a wind driven sculpture bought by Frances and made by Will’s new love, that has as its main feature, a discarded sandal slapping on a piece of driftwood. Rough Music indeed.

Patrick Gale has empathy. The group has read another of his books “Notes From An Exhibition”. In that we saw his thoughts on bipolar disorder. Both books treat their subjects with insight and awareness for both those who have it and those who are outside.

Here he presents a view of Alzheimer’s. He draws a picture of someone gradually succumbing to an incurable disease. Still able to laugh at herself and her outbursts, remembering the past and dreading the future.

His treatment of all the issues in this book are more caring than dramatic, although there are dramas. How could there not be with this range of life. A lovely book. Do read it.