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Tim O'Brien

328. Patrick Gale - Rough Music


This is another good book, but nothing like as good as no.327. It may be quite autobiographical (at least in its settings) and lacks the distance from the characters, particularly from Will/Julian (whose apparent different identities confused me for much of the book.

It is told in two alternating time zones - the present when Will is about 40 and a childhood holiday with his parents 30 years earlier. They revisit the same Cornish holiday cottage for reasons that become apparent near the end.

The parents, John a prison governor and his wife Frances who by the later part has the beginnings of alzheimer's are well drawn and characterised, but I found the gay younger generation – mainly Will/Julian – annoyingly sexually obsessed and selfish.


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