Just read Patrick Gale’s excellent Notes From an Exhibition for our bookgroup. Actually I had bought it before it was chosen as a book group book because I’m a PG fan but, anyway, last night was discussion night.
The starting point of the book is the recent death of once famous, now rather declined artist Rachel Keen. The narrative approach uses the eponymous exhibition notes to introduce various paintings which have resonance with different episodes in her life. Each episode is narrated through the third person viewpoint of either Rachel herself of her family – husband, four children, sister.
Since the book spans a time period of forty-odd years this device to pick out key, emblemmatic bits of Rachel’s life works extremely well and having the various episodes told through the eyes of her family gives us a glimpse into what has made the life of this woman so precarious and her art so powerful.
Rachel Keen is not a likeable woman. A personality dominated by the pervasive effects of her bipolar disorder (what used to be called manic depression), she is self-centred to a pathological degree (and I’m not using pathological there simply as an intensifier, I believe Gale is portraying a very specific, damaged kind of personality) she seems oblivious to the emotional needs of her children and husband and often appears, by neglecting to look beneath their careful, surface responses, astonishingly harsh and unkind to quite small children.
Notes from an Exhibition is a quite brilliant study of what someone who has a mental illness can do to a family. Because her husband, Anthony, fell in love with Rachel (or the idea of her) before she knew he existed, their marriage represents nothing more nor less than a heroic rescue and their children fall in behind Anthony as little footsoldiers in the fight to keep their mother sane. It drives at least one of them mad. (I say that, but it was probably genetics...)
But is Anthony’s loving care actually a gilded, chemically-barred cage in which Rachel is forced to live? Are her children actually not the products of a happy and successful marriage but a necessary expedient for Rachel whose only escape from Anthony’s benign regime of antipsychotic medication (which dulls her creativity) is to become pregnant? What is the relationship between artistic inspiration and mental instability? What do we owe our children? What do they owe us?
These were all questions which were thrashed around in our book group but I think the one, for me, which was most interesting is the one about the nature of bipolarity and artistic creativity. Yes, I can see it sparking creativity in artists, particularly those who do more or less abstract work; I can even see it working for poets. But novels? Plays? I’m not so sure. I don’t think the bursts of intense, visionary creativity which mania seems to afford would sustain the necessary plodding effort which you have to put in to a novel, I can’t see them providing a coherent plot.
Am I wrong? Does anybody have experience of bipolarity in novelists?
Oh, and because the novel has got a bit lost in the questions, Notes from an Exhibition is brilliant. I think it’s the best Patrick Dale I’ve read yet. If you’re interested in families, madness, characters and a story perfectly told with a beginning a middle and an end (but not necessarily in that order) I recommend it.
The starting point of the book is the recent death of once famous, now rather declined artist Rachel Keen. The narrative approach uses the eponymous exhibition notes to introduce various paintings which have resonance with different episodes in her life. Each episode is narrated through the third person viewpoint of either Rachel herself of her family – husband, four children, sister.
Since the book spans a time period of forty-odd years this device to pick out key, emblemmatic bits of Rachel’s life works extremely well and having the various episodes told through the eyes of her family gives us a glimpse into what has made the life of this woman so precarious and her art so powerful.
Rachel Keen is not a likeable woman. A personality dominated by the pervasive effects of her bipolar disorder (what used to be called manic depression), she is self-centred to a pathological degree (and I’m not using pathological there simply as an intensifier, I believe Gale is portraying a very specific, damaged kind of personality) she seems oblivious to the emotional needs of her children and husband and often appears, by neglecting to look beneath their careful, surface responses, astonishingly harsh and unkind to quite small children.
Notes from an Exhibition is a quite brilliant study of what someone who has a mental illness can do to a family. Because her husband, Anthony, fell in love with Rachel (or the idea of her) before she knew he existed, their marriage represents nothing more nor less than a heroic rescue and their children fall in behind Anthony as little footsoldiers in the fight to keep their mother sane. It drives at least one of them mad. (I say that, but it was probably genetics...)
But is Anthony’s loving care actually a gilded, chemically-barred cage in which Rachel is forced to live? Are her children actually not the products of a happy and successful marriage but a necessary expedient for Rachel whose only escape from Anthony’s benign regime of antipsychotic medication (which dulls her creativity) is to become pregnant? What is the relationship between artistic inspiration and mental instability? What do we owe our children? What do they owe us?
These were all questions which were thrashed around in our book group but I think the one, for me, which was most interesting is the one about the nature of bipolarity and artistic creativity. Yes, I can see it sparking creativity in artists, particularly those who do more or less abstract work; I can even see it working for poets. But novels? Plays? I’m not so sure. I don’t think the bursts of intense, visionary creativity which mania seems to afford would sustain the necessary plodding effort which you have to put in to a novel, I can’t see them providing a coherent plot.
Am I wrong? Does anybody have experience of bipolarity in novelists?
Oh, and because the novel has got a bit lost in the questions, Notes from an Exhibition is brilliant. I think it’s the best Patrick Dale I’ve read yet. If you’re interested in families, madness, characters and a story perfectly told with a beginning a middle and an end (but not necessarily in that order) I recommend it.
