The Aerodynamics of Pork

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Patrick Gale’s first novel was written as a way of subverting the recently-launched Betty Trask prize, which was then solely for romantic fiction. It is an alternative romance in two senses: almost every love affair in it is gay, lesbian, or somehow twisted, and the narrative alternates between chapters devoted to Seth, a gay schoolboy on the verge of turning sixteen, and Mo, a lesbian police detective with the Met. Seth is a musical prodigy, a violinist about to start at music college. As the summer holidays begin he joins his mother and sister at the Trenellion Music Festival, an eccentric Cornish institution his family helped to found. One by one, his rash pre-birthday wishes start to come true –- his sister is finally revealed as less than perfect, his father absents himself, he gets to play a prominent solo, and he falls head-over-heels in love. Meanwhile, in London, Mo is pursuing a romance of her own and may be about to arrest Seth’s unhinged papa. Are new sexual equality laws about to be announced? Pigs might fly. Confident and energetic as novels can only be when the writer has no sense of a public, The Aerodynamics of Pork is now often dismissed by its author as seeming overwritten and under-edited. But it remains a cult favourite with his following.