I think I might have tried to read this one before. If I did, a second attempt was no more successful and I abandoned this novel after a couple of chapters.
Perhaps I’ve just read too many Patrick Gale novels recently. You can have too much of a good thing.
Nine year old Dido skilfully looks after for her depressed mother, Eliza (who we soon learn is her aunt), in a windswept London council tower block. Some weekends she stays with her sort-of step-dad Giles and his newer girlfriend, Julia in the former family home – a fine north London residence.
Down in Cornwall we are introduced to Pearce who took on the family farm, reluctantly, when his father died. His separated sister Molly and her daughter Lucy live in a nearby town. Not one of the pretty ones.
Elizabethan madrigals and Roger Trevescan, a disgraced sixteenth century Cornish courtier, brings everything and everyone together.
Set largely in Penzance, Notes From An Exhibition tells us about the life of modern artist Rachel Kelly, and the impact bipolar disorder has on her life, her creativity and family.
Each chapter prefaced with an information card from a posthumous exhibition of her work and belongings, it’s a beautiful novel.
As an aside, this description (page 62) particularly resonated:
“Garfield’s feelings, by contrast, were a deep, forbidding pool, dark and unfathomable, stirred by sudden currents he could not control.”