Love Lane

This is a sequel to A Place Called Winter which I found I still remembered reasonably well despite having read it when it came out eleven years ago. I couldn’t remember all the details but when I was dropped back into Harry Cane’s life on the Canadian prairies at the beginning of this book things came back to me very quickly. I don’t think you need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. In fact the beginning of this book is a little devastating after the happy ending of the previous one.

In Love Lane a now elderly Harry takes a trip to see the now grown up daughter he left in England in the previous book. The storytelling is passed around between different members of the family and I did find this rather discombobulating when I realised we weren’t going to have enough time to revisit some of the characters again and I wanted to know more about them but in the end I think it all worked out. You see things differently from different viewpoints and the story emerges as a whole from the parts.

I’d remembered that Harry Cane was a fictionalised version of one of Gale’s own great-something grandfathers who went to farm in Canada. This story is set in the early 1950s and I wondered how much was being invented here. There’s a lot of little details that just seem too ridiculous to be anything but true, and some big details that seem almost too fitting to possibly be true. A read through various articles written by or about Patrick Gale in the The Guardian over the years makes it clear that though I’m sure there is a lot of fictionalisation to the narrative there’s also a core of definitive plausibility to the story. You probably don’t want to read those articles until after you’ve read the book!

All in all it’s a really well told story that’s much more than a family memoir. Very much recommended.