A Sweet Obscurity [Paperback]

I read this having read Rough Music, recommended by a friend, and having seen Gale talk at a literary festival. He was lovely, and I have my signed copy of tree Surgery for Beginners waiting on my bookshelf. But this isn’t the sort of book I usually read.

There are flaws in the book, for me. Cherubism is touched upon, but in such a fleeting, almost half-hearted way, that I was left wondering why it was featured at all. There was nothing I found offensive in the portrayal of this condition; it just didn’t seem to serve a purpose. The ends relating to that strand of the story, were left dangling unconvincingly, for me.

Gale creates characters you like and characters you don’t. Mainly characters I didn’t like, though I really enjoyed reading about them. I liked Pearce, though he was quite ineffectual. I liked something about Eliza, though she was a bit of a disaster. I liked Giles in part, though heaven knows why!!

This is a book in which a lot of disturbed or lonely individuals seek love and approval in varying degrees. At the end, everything is comfortable, but I don’t feel happiness. I get the impression it could all easily unravel, and that is refreshing.

I love the cosiness of this book. I love Cornwall, I’m from Cornwall, and I like to escape into the outside image of Cornwall sometimes. Gale indulges in that. He lives here, so I’m sure he knows it’s not as quaint and friendly as he sometimes paints it (I can’t remember the last time I was encouraged to pour my heart out to a kindly soul on a bus!), but it’s a lovely world to read about. Some of the details of Cornwall and the towns are so vivid, and known to locals - that’s nice to read!

Though I know I don’t seem to praise this book very highly, I must say that it had a rare effect on me, in that I was gripped by it. Not edge-of-the-seat stuff, just couldn’t put it down or wait to get back to it each time I was interrupted! I was absorbed by the book. With even the most fantastic books I have read, this is not the case, so Gale certainly has a gift for drawing his reader into the story.

Thoroughly enjoyable reading.

Eliza is a musicologist who has lost her way. She's wrecked her marriage with a foolish liaison, and is now living in some squalor in a council flat, while taking care of her young niece, Dido. Since her mother's death in a climbing accident, Dido has lived with Eliza, but Eliza is haunted by fears that her sister's medical problems might have been passed on to the child. Eliza "faces the bossy arrival of daylight with a kind of horror," and she sees with a stark clarity how cruel a sentence she and Dido are living under. She dearly loves her niece, but she is lonely, and short of money. Painfully honest, she acknowledges how much she misses her time as an Oxford student researching Elizabethan madrigals.

Giles is her estranged husband, an operatic counter tenor. He still loves Dido and claims, when it suits him, a paternal role in the child's life. A professional singer, he is haunted by his mother's sexual abuse and funnels his insecurities into his singing. He has a kind of cozy, simplistic domestic arrangement with his girlfriend Julia, but in all honesty, he still loves Eliza. The madrigal songs serve to cast their spell on Giles - "a kind of decorously erotic melancholy, ironing smooth his troublesome thoughts." Eliza and Dido were Giles' pets: He housed them and fed them and was solicitous of their welfare, but this darkens when we glimpse Giles' self-centered, and inappropriately sensual relationship with Dido.

Julia is Giles girlfriend, assistant to his conniving lesbian agent, Selina Bryant. Julia, discovering that she is pregnant, is "torn between the urge to love, and the cruel impulse to enlighten." She has grown used to the image of herself as practical and unflinching, but is forced to re-evaluate her life when she realizes that Giles doesn't love her. Pearce, perhaps the most likeable character, is a rugged, middle-aged Cornish beef farmer. After his father's death, he has reluctantly taken over the family farm, spends lonely evenings calling up pornographic websites, and worries that the days of small family farms are numbered. Pearce's eventual meeting with Dido and Eliza, when they holiday in Cornwall, shape the last half of the story. Pearce has learned "not to strive." He has an inner life, but he is not forever troubled to change or improve his outer one."

All the characters have an instinct to cling to security rather than daring to entertain alternatives. Quieter love amid "country goodness" and a "sweet obscurity" stand for what all five characters are pursuing - a place of safety in an insecure and vainglorious world. Classical music also features prominently, such as a hilarious account of a modern staging of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream, and Eliza's chance encounter with an amateur madrigal group in Cornwall. Sweet Obscurity is a little over-long - clocking in at almost five hundred pages - and the narrative tends to meander towards the end. Although not as taught and tightly structured as Rough Music, the novel still does a fine job of evoking the ties that bind people, and transient, often indefinable states that reveal the truth about people's deepest desires and discontents. Mike Leonard July 04.