Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re-
imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick Gale’s work — it feels entirely convincing that his secret should be ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

Sarah Waters has given us the gay historical novel as gothic drama. Patrick Gale’s approach is both less melodramatic and more optimistic.