Books: Sincere and painful look at nature of love

Patrick Gale's writing is sincere, but can creak and strain.

The 20th century has just begun. Harry Cave is married, personable, sophisticated. He's inherited a substantial fortune from a father who died of boredom.

A conventional Edwardian future snoozes ahead of him. God, he knows, is English.

But Harry is also gay. A sexual epiphany wrenches him off his sedate, somnolent path. With jolting speed, he loses wife, child, the brother to whom he's always been welded, and flees to a diametrically different existence as a farmer on the Canadian prairies.

It's a land so empty, the final railway stops are called Unity, Vera, Winter, Yonker and Zumbra, because "there's nothing else to call them".

Harry bends his back and his will; endures the months of shoulder-deep snow and scorched stubble; manages to find time for the Bachelors' Ball and a life-altering plunge in a scenic river.

He learns his own limits and resources, finds he's still vulnerable to "cruel gods" of all sorts, finds also that even at the world's apparent end, he's still "momentarily known for what he was", sometimes by lovers, sometimes by brutes and bigots.

Revelations come in wagon-loads. There's a loving ending for the protagonist, but a sobering range of distresses, deaths or continuing imprisonment for others who share his yearnings.

A Place Called Winter cares deeply for its characters and their tragedies. It's laceratingly honest. It's also a novel where polemic sometimes threatens to overwhelm plot.

Gale (he runs a website called Gale Warning, a title somewhere between clever and cute) has indicated there's a strongly biographical element to his story, which has its origins in a pair of bearskin mittens. No, I'm not telling you any more.

Though the resulting narrative is exotic, dramatic - and sometimes melodramatic - it's also one where lengthy accounts of early 20th century treatments of "deviants" (forcible immersion in hot baths; limbs bound with belts; massive sedation) sometimes shunt the plot sideways.

Plus there's the fact that almost everyone Harry encounters has a sexual identity crisis. Craggily handsome young Paul Slaymaker (great name) the prairie farmer; tormented Native American Ursula; fellow guests at an apparently liberal clinic: nearly every character seems a victim or tormentor.

Gale's cause and his commitment to it deserve every respect. As fiction, Winter frequently creaks and strains. As a call for comprehension and kindness, it's utterly sincere and admirable.

A Place Called Winter
by Patrick Gale
(Tinder Press $34.99)

David Hill is a Taranaki reviewer.

- Canvas