Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re-
imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick Gale’s work — it feels entirely convincing that his secret should be ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

Sarah Waters has given us the gay historical novel as gothic drama. Patrick Gale’s approach is both less melodramatic and more optimistic. His highly successful contemporary novels portray both gay and straight characters with the same vivid, clear-sighted but basically hopeful approach; there often seems to be a subtly didactic element in his characters’ successful relationships. Now, turning his attention to the Edwardian era, Gale doesn’t hold back from depicting its intolerance — but, typically for this unusually kind author, it’s a version of history that still holds out hope for happiness.

Harry’s childhood and first marriage, upholstered in the furbelows of Edwardian life — palms in the conservatory and boating on the Thames, with a salacious underpinning of chorus girls and scandal — are stiff with the chilly falsities of the period. The overwhelming impression of the gentle, stammering young protagonist is of a character so scarred by a loveless childhood that he is at first incapable of emotion.