It shares with that work a fascination with untypical relationships and families. Like its predecessor Rough Music, A Sweet Obscurity is set in Cornwall, where Gale now lives. Patrick Gale’s novels have become progressively more difficult to précis none more so than A Sweet Obscurity, his longest and most ambitious since The Facts of Life in 1995. He explores, with tenderness and understanding, the unexpected feelings that grow between Eliza and Pearce, and offers a memorable study of a child forced cruelly, even tragically, to grow up much too soon.
His greatest strength lies in his sensitive evocation of those transient, often indefinable states that reveal the truth about people’s deepest desires and discontents. Pearce’s eventual meeting with Dido and Eliza seems at once predictable and contrived.īut Gale always writes knowledgeably and entertainingly about music, whether in Giles’s career or Eliza’s research, which is, to her surprise, revived by a visit to a madrigal group in Cornwall. The London story is interrupted, confusingly at first, by chapters detailing the life of another unhappy character: a Cornishman called Pearce who, after his father’s death (probably suicide), has reluctantly taken over the family farm and spends lonely evenings calling up pornographic websites.
The novel is perhaps over-long, and sometimes seems too elaborately and self-consciously plotted. Gale views the fashionable couple with a sardonically amused detachment that darkens, disconcertingly, when we glimpse Giles’s self-centred, inappropriately sensual relationship with the child.
He died in obscurity professional#
A professional singer, a counter-tenor who has parlayed his minor talent into a moderately successful career, he is helped by his ambitious wife, an agent “good at telling people they were wonderful”.
He still claims, when it suits him, a paternal role in the child’s life. Their lives are complicated by the presence of Giles, who shared a flat with Eliza in Oxford - he fell in love with her, he admits now, when he saw her with the baby Dido. When the precociously sensitive Dido asks when she was last truly happy, Eliza recalls, nostalgically and guiltily, life before her sister’s death “thrust motherhood” on her. She dearly loves her niece, left to her care as a baby, but she is lonely, short of money and lives in a dreary London council flat painfully honest, she acknowledges how much she misses her time as an Oxford student researching Elizabethan music. Gale writes about the complex Eliza with shrewdness and sympathy. Since her mother’s death in a climbing accident, which might have been suicide, she has lived with her aunt, Eliza, who is haunted by fears that the mother’s medical problems (at this stage, the terrible details are only hinted at) might have been passed on to the child. A shadow is cast over the child’s life from the start. Paperback: .uk | Hive | Waterstones | ĮBook: Amazon Kindle | iBookstore (UK) | KoboĪ Sweet Obscurity is now available in the US as an eBookĮBook: Amazon Kindle | iBookstore (US) | Barnes & Noble| Google Play | KoboĪ small girl called Dido - lively, engaging and convincingly intelligent - is at the centre of Patrick Gale’s intriguing and impressive novel. Read an extract from A Sweet Obscurity (Kindle Preview) Read an extract Read an extract from A Sweet Obscurity (PDF download) To hear the opening pages of Patrick’s recording of the audiobook, click here. To order your copy through and so support local bookshops, click here. Patrick has an active dream life which has often helped him with his writing but this is the first of his novels to have been inspired by a dream. Apparently a piece of minor narrative colour at first, this lyric comes to stand for what all five characters are pursuing – a place of safety in an insecure and vainglorious world. In the novel Eliza chances on the manuscript of a lost madrigal by a bisexual composer who left Elizabeth I’s court after a scandal to cultivate “a second, quieter love” amid “country goodness and a sweete obscuritie” on his family’s remote estates in Cornwall.
The title is not quite a quote from an Elizabethan song lyric. Dido has stumbled upon a terrible secret but is realising that none of the adults in her life is strong enough or focussed enough to help her deal with it… Running through the four strands, ensnaring the adult’s hearts and effectively controlling their destinies, is Dido, the niece Eliza adopted on her sister’s death. Pearce is a Cornish beef farmer, as yet unconnected to any of them. Julia is his girlfriend, assistant to his machiavellian lesbian agent. Giles is her estranged husband, an operatic counter tenor. Eliza is a musicologist who has lost her way, wrecked her marriage with a foolish liaison and is now living in some squalor in a council flat. A Sweet Obscurity is told from the alternating viewpoints of four characters.
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