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Towards the end of Love Lane, elderly protagonist Harry Cane becomes a figure of twinkly-eyed mischief. Gossiping with his granddaughter Pip, he advises her that “people without secrets … are like people with very tidy houses: usually not worth knowing”.
Dangerously buried secrets are very much the order of the day in Patrick Gale’s 18th novel. We start as we mean to go on: Love Lane opens with a recounting of the clandestine relationship between widower Harry and his bachelor brother-in-law Paul Slaymaker, Englishmen who separately emigrated to Canada around the turn of the last century. We first meet them as homesteaders in the unforgiving Saskatchewan wilds; Gale aficionados who encountered Cane in 2015’s A Place Called Winter remember the dark cloud of scandal that hastened his departure from Britain. The “steady tenderness” between Harry and Paul, which is passingly reminiscent of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, gives the men succour as their neighbouring farms weather the bitter economic vicissitudes of the 1920s and 30s, but their wordlessly powerful bond is for ever altered by the arrival of Dimpy, a woman down on her luck, and her hard-hearted son, Davy.
Delivered in a voice that’s often quite loudly expositional, the narrative sprints through the second world war. A series of events, many devastating and brutal, soon see Harry reconnecting with Betty, his long-lost daughter from an early marriage. The groundwork is laid for Harry’s somewhat equivocal return home. Whether those green and pleasant lands still constitute home for Harry after such a marked hiatus becomes one of the novel’s central questions.
After crossing the Atlantic, we’re introduced to a host of other narrative perspectives: affable Betty gets a good few chapters, as does her doughty husband, Terry, a prison governor. We also hear from their grownup daughter Pip and her ascetic husband Mike, both of whom have secrets of their own. These glimpses into lives adjacent to Harry’s as he returns to his radically changed birthplace round out Gale’s presentation of 1950s England. While he asserts that this is “a novel not a memoir”, it draws significantly on his family history and letters and is rich in rigorously detailed period colour. The realities of rationing, irascible charladies, clouds of Dubonnet and Ascot water heaters all feature in a colourful evocation of the times.
In Love Lane, it’s the alleyways and sidestreets of the narrative that provide most interest and entertainment. Secondary characters and subplots rather steal the show: the “galére of formidable, big-bosomed aunts” who raise Betty after her father absconds to Canada and her mother tragically dies provide a fabulously catty element. Whistle, Betty’s highly strung, free-speaking youngest daughter, is a breath of fresh air, as is racy Vivvy, who leads sensible ingenue Pip astray during her long engagement to Mike. But it’s an odd feature of the novel that the liveliness and appealingly gossipy tone of these peripheral sections often meant I lost sense of where the centre of the novel truly was. Harry becomes out of focus as all these other stories crowd in. When he very decisively takes centre stage again as the novel draws to a close, I was unsure how emotionally satisfying and successfully realised I found his arc.
Still, there is an enviable lightness to Gale’s sentences. The comedy has a Forsterian ease in its profound Englishness: asides about wedding day wardrobe malfunctions and bourgeois euphemisms for genitalia are all part of the novel’s unashamed Call the Midwife chumminess. Equally, Gale’s descriptions of the small commonplaces of domestic life often have a pure brilliance to them. A sketch of Mike’s nervous hands snapping the stems of sherry glasses and Harry’s great-granddaughter’s fascination with a long spiral of apple peel are particularly fine. There is darkness, too, especially with regards to the portrayal of the prison Terry governs. The criminalisation of queerness and Terry’s overseeing the hanging of two young and likely innocent inmates are attended to with dignity and nuance.
The novel’s title alludes, specifically, to the street on which Pip and Mike live in Wakefield, and where they host Harry – “Cowboy Grandpa” – for a few eventful weeks. But its significance extends beyond that. What is most palpable about this novel is the evident love the author feels towards the characters of his semi-fictional universe. There is a refreshing warmth and gentleness in Gale’s precisely imagined vision of these connected lives that makes for a kindly, immensely companionable read.
