LITERARY FICTION
TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU by Patrick Gale
(Tinder Press £18.99) PATRICK GALE’S experience as a child who found salvation and a sense of belonging in music deeply informs this, his 16th novel. Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, sensitive Eustace has always felt out of place, until his mother signs him up for lessons with an inspirational cello teacher.
Soon, Eustace can think of little else — except his hopeful, fumbling relationship with his best friend, Vernon — and becomes good enough at the cello for his parents to send him on a summer residency at a highly exclusive music camp (but not good enough to gain a permanent place).
Told in flashbacks as Eustace, in late middle-age and facing a cancer diagnosis, looks back on a life that ended up not involving music at all, it proceeds with the partial, unresolved structure of memory itself. Some aspects of Eustace’s life, specifically the actions of his possibly bisexual mother, are never made fully clear.
Gale is excellent on the hot, messy nature of self-discovery and sexual awakening, but curiously not so good at writing about music. The extensive detailing of Eustace’s relationship with the cello is precisely where the novel refuses to sing.
BELLEVUE SQUARE by Michael Redhill
(No Exit Press £8.99) IF PAUL AUSTER were to turn his hand to grip-lit, the result might look something like this slow-burning mindboggler from Canadian writer Michael Redhill.
When Jean, who works in a bookshop in Toronto, is told by a new acquaintance she has a doppelganger called Ingrid, Jean is determined to track her down — but then the acquaintance is murdered.
Another customer who claims to have seen Ingrid is then found hanged in his apartment. Soon, Jean becomes obsessed with her phantom self, staking out Bellevue Square, a former hangout for misfits, drug addicts and the mentally ill, where Ingrid has been seen many times.
She grows detached from her husband and two sons, who are convinced Jean is having a mental breakdown.
By radically scrambling the construct of selfhood and, with it, the stability of narrative, the novel ends up resembling an M.C. Escher painting, with plot strands that double-back on themselves. There’s plenty of fun to be had in this, the first in a projected trilogy, but you might find the frustrations outweigh the pleasures.
ALL AMONG THE BARLEY by Melissa Harrison
(Bloomsbury £16.99) FAST emerging as one of our finest nature writers, Melissa Harrison combines a deep knowledge of our rural landscape with an unsentimental understanding of how our environment informs the way we live.
Her third novel takes place in a Suffolk village in the Thirties, where the teenage narrator, Edie, a farmer’s daughter, has become transfixed by a glamorous Londoner, Constance. The woman is visiting the village to record the old ways of rural life before they disappear for ever.
Readers become aware of Constance’s more sinister political allegiances long before Edie does, but although Harrison is interesting on the history of rural fascism in England before the war, she is absolutely excellent at evoking the byways, misunderstandings and sexual crisis of adolescence. She also has fun skewering the modern fetishising of rural life.
At times the plot feels a bit overcrowded, but it’s a still a beautiful and wholly tragic novel.