Notes From an Exhibition

When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies raving in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind her paintings of genius - but she leaves also a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.

Patrick Gale’s novel is the story of a woman he has called “my most frightening mother to date”. She’s a genius, a loving wife and parent, and a faithful friend, but she’s also tormented by bipolar disorder and is driven by an artistic compulsion -- often barely distinguishable from her mental illness -- to damage all who try to love and protect her.

*Notes from an Exhibition* takes its title from the information cards displayed beside works of art in a gallery or museum. Each chapter in the novel begins with a different example, all of them referring to Kelly’s art or possessions. We never see examples of her work, but it is described in detail and a cumulative effect of the novel is the reader’s sense that they are walking around a retrospective of her art.

Each chapter reflects in some way the object or art work that the curatorial voice describes at its outset, sometimes directly, sometimes in some enigmatic way. There’s a sense that the curator’s notes give us the official version, the art gives us another and the piece of narrative that follows yet another. The messy, human truth lies somewhere in between all three.

Roughly half of the chapters are told from Rachel’s viewpoint and these form the novel’s backbone, portraying key episodes in her life that take us to Penzance, to New York, and to Toronto, from an idyllic afternoon on a Cornish beach to a nightmarish spell on a psychiatric ward. Interleaved with her story, however, are the stories of her sister, her husband, and her four children, each of them giving a different perspective on this extraordinary woman, each of them seen both in youth and in adulthood.

What emerges is the intensely dramatic and complex history of one woman and her almost-inhuman dedication to art but also a moving portrait of her marriage to a long-suffering Quaker English teacher and a study of the way her ambiguous gifts wreck emotional havoc within her family even after her death.

Drawing on the West Cornish settings Patrick Gale knows so well, it will please fans of his earlier Cornish novel, *Rough Music*, not merely in its depiction of a troubled family but in the exciting way it leads its reader to play detective with the assortment of narrative evidence laid before them.