Love Lane by Patrick Gale review – a homecoming tale with echoes of Brokeback Mountain

This kindly and companionable story of a man returning to 50s England after living in Canada offers a colourful evocation of the times Towards the end of Love Lane, elderly protagonist Harry Cane becomes a figure of twinkly-eyed mischief. Gossiping with his granddaughter Pip, he advises her that “people without secrets … are like people with very tidy houses: usually not worth knowing”. Dangerously buried secrets are very much the order of the day in Patrick Gale’s 18th novel. We start as we mean to go on: Love Lane opens with a recounting of the clandestine relationship between widower Harry and his bachelor brother-in-law Paul Slaymaker, Englishmen who separately emigrated to Canada around the turn of the last century. We first meet them as homesteaders in the unforgiving Saskatchewan wilds; Gale aficionados who encountered Cane in 2015’s A Place Called Winter remember the dark cloud of scandal that hastened his departure from Britain. The “steady tenderness” between Harry and Paul, which is passingly reminiscent of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, gives the men succour as their neighbouring farms weather the bitter economic vicissitudes of the 1920s and 30s, but their wordlessly powerful bond is for ever altered by the arrival of Dimpy, a woman down on her luck, and her hard-hearted son, Davy. Continue reading...

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