The Independent calls him “brilliant”. The Guardian says his prose “ is as clear and bright as the Cornish light”. OutUK has claimed him as "arguably Britain's most successful openly gay author".
All this praise may be a little embarrassing for Patrick Gale, who’s always been terribly polite and unassuming about his success. He’s been gathering a fan base ever since he published his first two novels, The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease, at the age of 24 – though it was only three years ago that he gained serious mainstream fame with the award-winning Notes From An Exhibition.
To date, he’s written fifteen books, including a biography and a collection of short stories. His heroes have come in all flavours, from bipolar painters to policewomen, diplomats’ wives and tree surgeons – though he’s always thrown at least one or two gay or lesbian characters in the mix.
His own story’s pretty remarkable too. Born on the Isle of Wight as the son of a prison governor, he later studied as a chorister at a cathedral choir school and worked as a typist, a designer’s secretary and a singing waiter. Today, he lives with his husband Aidan Hicks on a farm in the far west of England, where, if his website is to be believed, he’s concentrating his talents on learning how to drive his tractor round a corner in reverse.
He’ll be in Singapore for a book talk on Friday, 19 February, where he’ll be in conversation with his personal friend, homegrown author Suchen Christine Lim. (Lim is already familiar to many of us: as the mother of a gay activist son, she’s performed her queer-affirming short stories not only at the IndigNation Queer Festival, but also in church – a real gutsy lady.)
A fiction writing workshop, titled City of Four Million Storeys, has also been scheduled for Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 February, led by the two authors in a Joo Chiat shophouse. Sadly, I’ve been told by the British Council that tickets are sold out for that event.
Fortunately for the rest of us, Gale agreed to an online interview before he left for Singapore.
æ: Age/Sex/Location?
Patrick: I am 48. I am male. I live on my husband's farm at the very tip of England's big toe, where we raise beef cattle and grow barley.
æ: So, are you really "arguably Britain's most successful openly gay author"?
Patrick: Heavens! I suppose it depends on how we define our terms. I'm certainly pretty successful these days in that I make a comfortable living purely through writing novels but I can think of several lesbian or gay British authors who are far more successful, both in terms of their wealth and their literary standing. Alan Hollinghurst and Sarah Waters have both managed to combine writing in detail about gay and lesbian experience with achieving the highest literary accolades the UK offers. I feel pretty soft-core by comparison!
æ: Could you tell us about how you became a writer?
Patrick: It happened by accident, really. I had always written in my youth. Writing fiction was always something I did entirely unself-consciously but I think precisely because it came so easily to me I didn't think of it as a career.
I really wanted to be a performer, first a musician then an actor. It was only when my agent found me a publisher for my (very gay) first novel that it dawned on me being a novelist was a viable alternative. I had no training as such but I studied English Literature and Language at university, which meant I had to read a great deal, and I maintain that the best writing training comes from reading and imitation.
æ: What was it like coming out in the UK in the '80s? Was being openly gay a barrier to literary success in any way?
Patrick: Well as I say my first novel was very gay. It was a comedy – The Aerodynamics of Pork – in which every single character, even the most apparently straight ones, turns out to have at least had some gay or lesbian experience.
In this and my other early novels I think I was unusual in approaching my gay material with a kind of anarchic optimism. My contemporaries at the time were writing a lot of very grim and gloomy stuff. Taking Armistead Maupin and Iris Murdoch as my models, I concentrated instead on taking being gay as the starting point for an adventure, as an opportunity – a blessing, if you like, rather than a curse.
Funnily enough I assumed that only a gay publishing house would be interested in my first novel yet Gay Men's Press turned it down as they thought its cheerfulness was an insult to gay readers who had suffered! I might have given up on writing gay novels then and there if my agent hadn't come along, liked the novel and proceeded to place my work with a series of respectable, mainstream publishing houses.
Gay material was still very rare in mainstream publishing houses in the mid 80s and the little that was published was American and miserable, sex-obsessed stuff. If I was swiftly embraced by a mainstream readership, straight as well as gay, I think it was because I offered a refreshing alternative – intensely English and unexpectedly cheerful. Far from being a problem, my gayness and my matter-of-fact approach to it provided one of my selling points. If anything it became a problem a little later, when I was keen to write about straight as well as gay experience and had to persuade my readers to come with me.
æ: Which of your books are you proudest of today? And which of your characters?
Patrick: I'm grateful to Notes from an Exhibition, because it won me such a big readership, but I think I remain proudest of an earlier novel, Rough Music. This is an uncomfortable novel about a family thrown into crisis by two terrible sexual betrayals in its history in which both the mother and later her son are caught out in affairs with their respective brothers-in-law.
I remain very proud of the gay son in that book. I did something that is still pretty unusual which was to show that he was gay in his very soul when he was only seven – at an age where he is only just starting to develop sexual awareness – and I tried to show how, like all too many gay people, unfortunately, he causes terrible problems for himself and those he loves by lying to himself. He convinces himself he's fine about being gay, that he's a happy, grounded, modern guy when in fact his adult life is shot through with encoded self-hatred and self-deception. I think precisely because I was so tough on that character, the romantic happiness I allow him at the very end of the novel, feels real rather than just fairy dust. (I have a weakness for sparkly, happy endings so tend to resist them at every turn...)
æ: What other contemporary writers do you admire? Are there any figures you think are being consistently overlooked or underrated?
PG: Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst I've already mentioned. I'm also a big fan of a wonderful Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, who has explored the gay experience both in repressively Catholic Ireland and in the echoes he found of it in 1970s Argentina.
Another fascinating writer, and one not nearly as celebrated as she should be, is Patricia Duncker. Her first novel, Hallucinating Foucault, has one of the most convincing portrayals of homoerotic obsession I've ever read and I'm very excited to have just received her latest – a sort of thriller – in the post. In many ways she's the natural heir to Patricia Highsmith, only her writing is much more interesting...
æ: Could you tell us a bit about how you met your husband? (C'mon, everyone loves a love story.)
PG: Ours was a very early example of Internet dating. Way back when people were first starting to get e-mail and when we all went online by painfully slow dial-up connections, I gave an interview to Gay Times. They ran it on their website as well, along with a flatteringly Byronic photograph of me walking my dog on the cliffs near where I lived back then. Aidan emailed me through the website to say that he lived in Cornwall but didn't recognise the cliffs and so our correspondence started. We exchanged e mails at least once a day for weeks before we finally had the courage to meet so probably revealed a lot about ourselves through words that we might have kept hidden had we met at a party or in a nightclub.
What I love is that now whenever I have to travel far away, we revert to e mailing, which is a little like courting all over again. He gives very good e-mail. He has a wicked sense of humour and I think it's a very good sign that, after over ten years, we still make each other laugh several times a day.
æ: So what's it like living in the country? And is it really true that Land's End is now a mecca for gay and lesbian couples?
PG: For most gay people the country is where they escape from, but I was never very good at city life and I'm so easily distracted that I need peace and quiet if I'm to get on with writing.
I love it here. We're surrounded by amazing scenery – beaches and cliffs and fields full of flowers and wildlife – lots of space in which to walk and hear my thoughts. Land's End isn't especially gay, but people are very relaxed. I often get fan mail addressed to Patrick Gale, Gay Farmer, Land's End and it finds me!
It was only when Civil Partnerships came in, though, that the government finally got some hard facts about how many gay and lesbian couples there were and where they lived – all good stuff politically as it gives us our proper weight as members of the electorate. What was completely unexpected was discovering that our part of Cornwall, West Penwith, had a tremendous number of gay and lesbian couples who had "married" within the first year of the law changing. Where are they all? It's a bit of a mystery. I think lots of them must be couples who wanted nothing better, once they met and fell in love, than to move deep into the country and quietly disappear.
For me the most precious thing about becoming Aidan's civil partner (I call him my husband) has been becoming boringly normal: just another couple going round the garden centre or walking the dogs. And it has been fascinating to see the speed with which our tabloid press – once horrible vindictive where gay stories were concerned – seems to have embraced this change. These papers now report new gay partnerships among celebrities, and bust-ups, with the same tone that they use for straight ones, which has to be a healthy sign.
æ: Do you travel a lot? I know you've visited Asia before - what've your impressions been?
PG: I seem to travel to Australia the most, as my novels do very well there. Asia is still very new to me. I've had just one book tour around China and this will be my first visit to Singapore. I'm very excited but also deeply curious and fear a long weekend won't be nearly long enough to learn all I would like to learn.
æ: What should people expect at your writing seminar?
PG: I hope it will be hard work but also great fun. I have taught with Suchen Christine Lim before, in Scotland, and believe we have a natural affinity as, like me, she seems to be an anarchist disguised as a well behaved person! We'll be exploring hot to build up characters, how to evoke a sense of place and, I hope, showing how some of the best, most life-like, plots grow out of accidents.
æ: Anything else you'd like to say to our readers? And perhaps to aspiring gay writers in Asia?
PG: Fiction is all about empathy. It's through fiction that people can be encouraged to understand, if not like, people they would never talk to or even share a room with in real life. For me, and I hope for you too, writing and reading fiction is a constant process of extending our understanding by trying other lives and other viewpoints on for size. There will always be a place for political activism but I think hearts and minds can also be won through the "softer" approach of the arts. Songs, films and novels really can change attitudes, especially when they take people unawares.
Meet Patrick Gale and Suchen Christine Lim at “Family Matters: The Writings of Patrick Gale”, a book talk held on Friday, February 19, from 8:00pm - 9:30pm in the Blue Room, The Arts House, Old Parliament Lane. Admission is free, but registration is recommended. Please write to arts@britishcouncil.org.sg, citing PATRICK in the subject line.