I recently spent a few delightful days in Cornwall where my host/friend, with whom I share a love of books and words, recommended Notes From An Exhibition which is set mostly in Penzance just a few miles from her lovely home. Well I’d read Patrick Gale before but had somehow missed this 2007 title so I ordered it on the spot.
Rachel Kelly, a hugely successful household name painter, has just died and we are walking round a posthumous exhibition of her work and getting a strong sense both of her abstract style and of her status. Gale uses the notices attached to the works on display as pegs for an account of her complicated, troubled personal life and the mental illness she was dogged by. It’s an unusual narrative method which involves a lot of time shifts and switches in points of view (although it’s written entirely in the third person) but he makes it work with aplomb.
Rachel and her very grounded school teacher husband, Antony, raise four children, the eldest of whom she was already pregnant with by someone else when she marries. That son, Garfield is happily married, living nearby and longing to start a family which doesn’t seem to be happening. Then there’s Morwenna, who has been out of contact for many years so we await the unravelling of her personal mystery. Hedley is in a happy gay relationship – although there’s a hiccup – with a London art dealer and the youngest, Petroc, is evidently dead although Gale keeps us waiting a long time to find out what happened to him. Moreover, there is a question mark over the circumstances of Rachel’s death given that her bi-polar condition has, in the past, triggered a number of suicide attempts and several hospitalised bouts of severe post-natal depression triggered by her refusal to take her regular medication during pregnancy. There is also a big hole in family knowledge about Rachel’s Canadian origins and the truth is gradually revealed.
It’s a richly layered novel about, in no particular order, marriage, adolescence, grief, art, Cornwall, mental illness, identity, Quakerism and siblings. I liked it a lot.
