Rough Music (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Book Review : Rough Music by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale’s book Rough Music is no easy read, with melancholia cascading through every page and sadness, despair and a sense of doom permeating every chapter. Yet the book, rambling in is initial half grows on you and in the latter half as the book reaches its ending and climax, it begins to be a book you can no longer put down. And yet having read it and finished it, it is debatable whether I would choose to pick it up for another read on another day.  

Rough Music is the story of the transmission of generational grief and the book oscillates between two holidays taken on the same Cornwall beach house spread over three decades and each with its own particular tragedy. Frances Pagett a lady suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her husband John are taken for a holiday by their son Willy to a Cornwall beach house. The holiday is actually a present to Willy from his cousin sister Poppy and her husband but Willy thinks it would be a good change for his parents. The beach house seems familiar to Willy but he can’t be sure and in any case he has other things on his mind- Will I gay and is actually sleeping with his brother in law who is bisexual. The isolated holiday home provides him the perfect opportunity for a prolonged tryst with his sister away in the city.  

The story is familiar to John and Frances too for close to three decades ago, when Willy and his sister were small, they had taken a similar holiday and it seems that they had stayed in the same cottage. The memories of that holiday were not pleasant however; the holiday was interrupted for John, a jail official when there was a jail break and he had to hurriedly go back leaving behind his wife and son along with his visiting brother in law and his teenaged daughter.

Patrick Gale manages to explore the deepest frailties of the human being and the extreme fragility of relationships. He dispenses with the notion that children are innocent, guileless creatures by making them the centre piece of some of the most devastating episodes in the book. It is Will, then a small child who reveals to his father hurrying back to join his family after dealing with the jail break that his mother and uncle had been having an affair, it was Will who ha helped out some what unwittingly in the jail break, it was Will who had with shaky, childish fingers taken a picture of his mother and uncle that would keep the affair for ever.

The adults are no better. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, Frances may be , but it is she who brings out the fact in one of her more manic moments that Will is gay and that he actually sleeps with his brother in law devastating family relationships.  The punch line is where Poppy, the daughter abandoned by her father affair his affair came to light takes her revenge. Nursing a sense of hurt for years, she takes here revenge in the most painful way possible. Knowing the course of Alzheimer’s disease and knowing that memories of the distant past are the last to go, she deliberately maneuvers to buy a holiday at the very same beach cottage where they had stayed as a child knowing that Will would never take a holiday alone and that if Frances went there and recognized the place as was likely, the ghosts of the past would come back to haunt.

Rough Music is a depiction of the hellish depravity to which the human spirit can descend. Spite, jealousy, revenge, anger, sorrow, manipulation and every thing else that can deprave the human race. The story is described well, the characters are deeply etched and all that, and yet the book leaves you with a sense of disquiet. Is it a good book? Well it has some great reviews. Will I read it again? Unlikely. Will I recommend it to others? Well may be as a work of melancholia!