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Penzance Literary Festival 2019 - Damian Barr and Patrick Gale


07 July 2019

The Penzance Literary Festival celebrates its 10th birthday this year.  Famous and  local author, Patrick Gale, has been one of the Festival's strong supporters and instigators and he was hosting an "in conversation"  with Damien Barr - a literature promoter turned novelist who "Salon" in London will soon be the subject of BBC TV coverage.   Barr had also been a previous visitor to the Festival and the rather wonderful Acorn Theatre.   The Theatre was both packed and looking great with a vaulted roof,  large hanguing papier mache' demons in the vaults and dramatic stage and excellent technical presentation and the stage door left open to allow a cool breeze to soften the heat of the July sunshine awy.   Also Waterstones the  booksellers were supporting the Festival by providing the bookselling and signing service - thanks to the Truro management for offering a great selection of new books.

Damien Barr was promoting a new novel You will be Safe Here a story set in South Africa,  partly in the Boer War, partly in Rainbow revolutionary 1994.  The novel deals with the terrible impact of Lord Kitchener's scorched earth tactics used against the Boers, and the establishment  of concentrations camps (a sordid British invention)  for corralling the women, children and non-combatants of the Boers to deny the commando Boer groups of home comforts and food.  It was Emily Hobhouse, the Cornish daughter of the Rector of St Ive and spinster who shamed the British government by writing detailed accounts of the terrible conditions imposed on Boer women, using her family influences to.      "You will be Safe Here" has a 1994 setting as well, the years of the final ascent of the ANC and the defeat of apartheid .....I have yet to read it but purchased an unsigned copy after dutifully queueing in the post presentation babble.

Gale and Barr are evidently friends and the occasion had more than a hint of looking in on a slightly gilded  literary elite (the "Salon"  which Damie Barr runs in London has the same scent of that) giving an insight to a provincial (mostly female) audience on the periphery  - but Barr's Scottish lowland vowels and his enthusiasm, depth of reading, engaging manner, quick wit, soon dispel any sense of snootiness.   He was also self-deprecating, praised his teachers  and helpful to questioners when the Q&A came.  In fact the event was high entertainment - Gale was extremely well prepared and excellent in drawing out Barr - who was engagingly  ready to pour forth with integrity anecdote's from his  early life (the subject of his well-received 2013 memoir  Maggie and Me. 


Patrick Gale's "Notes from an Exhibition" was the first of several novels I have read of this insightful and engaging writer - good on character, and particularly relationships,  simple plotting, stylish and clear writing - not as artful and learned as McEwan or Julian .  His latest novel "Take Nothing With You"  reads to me a bit like a memoir for Patrick Gale as it touches on the cello,  the character of Jane Cowan the inspirational and eccentric cello teacher  who ran the International Cello CEntre in the Scottish Borders who impacted Gale's early musical  life

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