Eustace, a London property developer in his early 50s, has been locked in a lead-lined room. In order to combat thyroid cancer, he must ingest a radioactive iodine tablet and spend 24 hours in isolation sweating out the effects. He has been instructed to take nothing into the radiation suite that cannot be left behind. To stave off boredom he has brought with him a cheap, disposable MP3 player loaded with cello music.
Patrick Gale’s novel is as elegiac and contemplative as one might expect, given a central character who has nothing to do except sit and listen to cello sonatas. Had he not become a writer, Gale might have been a musician. As a promising youngster he was selected to attend courses at the International Cello Centre, a residential school in the Scottish borders, where his contemporaries included Steven Isserlis. It was partly thanks to Isserlis’s encouragement that Gale took up the instrument again for pleasure in his 40s.
The young Eustace’s story is very similar to Gale’s even if the setting is fictional. Gale grew up in Winchester but Eustace lives in Weston-super-Mare, where his parents run a retirement home. Gale evocatively presents 1970s Weston as a transient world of estuary mud and trifle made with tinned mandarin segments, though it is clear from the outset that Eustace doesn’t fit in here. For a start, he plays the cello, an instrument whose ungainliness seems to engender a premature sense of responsibility: “It was quite heavy but the weightiness was part of the adult burden he was to take on.” Then there is the fact that he doesn’t have the usual reaction to the porn magazines passed around class. Rather than finding the pictures arousing, Eustace would “linger on extraneous details … a macrame pot holder he would have liked in his own room”.
This limited cultural horizon expands when he begins to study with charismatic teacher Carla Gold, who lives with some gay friends in a bohemian enclave of Bristol. Here Eustace is exposed to art, literature and the perfect recipe for tomato sauce – as well as discovering the true meaning of suffering for one’s art when he is instructed in the technique of thumb position (a means of extending the cello’s high register often likened to pressing down on cheese wire).
Eustace’s progress is so promising that he secures a place at a summer school run by the inspiring if irascible Jean Curwen (a thinly disguised portrait of the guru Jane Cowan who taught Gale and Isserlis). Here he receives his first same-sex kiss, but also recognises that he won’t make the grade as a top-flight professional.
It is worth noting that, for his 16th novel, Gale has revisited the subject matter of his first, The Aerodynamics of Pork, published in 1985. On his website, Gale dismisses this early work as “over-written and under-edited”, but it featured a teenage gay violin prodigy named Seth, whose precocious ability to convey emotions beyond his years strikes his mother – a cello teacher – as almost disturbing: “Passion could no more be compassed by dexterity alone than a ten-year-old could be expected to understand the vagaries of lust, but when Evelyn first heard him play Brahms she had been as shocked as if her son had gravely proposed incest.”
Eustace develops into a richer, more engaging character than Seth precisely because he does not possess the nonchalant abilities of a born prodigy. For example, his teacher frets that he lacks the emotional experience required to play Rachmaninov: “Regret. The whole movement expresses regret. One day you’ll understand the kind of thing he means, but for now, just think of how you feel when you remember a perfect day that you can never, ever have again.”
Above all, Gale makes it clear that playing the cello is tough. Eustace’s most impressive quality is his stoicism – the instrument acts as a shield from drab, depressing Weston as his parents’ marriage and their shabby retirement home are falling apart. His dedication is such that he’s prepared to endure any amount of discomfort: “He decided the pain in his thumb was like the necessary agony of young ballerinas learning to dance on pointes, aspiring to grace even as their shoe tips filled with blood”.
Even if these qualities ultimately fail to pave the way for a professional career, they stand Eustace in good stead once he emerges from the lead-lined room. Take Nothing With You poignantly illustrates the curse of being born with musical talent but lacking the essential spark of genius, yet is suffused with the joy and wisdom of Gale’s mid-life reconnection with music.
• Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale is published by Tinder. To order a copy for £14.99 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
