Mother's Boy: A beautifully crafted novel of war, Cornwall, and the relationship between a mother and son

Written by Patrick Gale

Narrated by Patrick Gale

From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes MOTHER'S BOY, a superb historical novel of Cornwall, class, desire and two world wars.

'One of the joys of Gale's writing is how even the smallest of characters can appear fully formed, due to a charming wickedness alongside deeper observations' Irish Times

Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.

As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.

MOTHER'S BOY is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.

'A writer with heart, soul, and a dark and naughty wit, one whose company you relish and trust' Observer

(P) 2022 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headline
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781472257390

Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land's End. He's a passionate gardener, cook, and cellist and chairs the North Cornwall Book Festival each October. His fifteen novels include A Perfectly Good Man and Notes From an Exhibition -- both of which were Richard and Judy Bookclub selections -- The Whole Day Through, and Rough Music. His latest, A Place Called Winter, draws intriguingly on his family history. You can find out more on his website www.galewarning.org.

Reviews for Mother's Boy

[edwardsgt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fictionalised biography of Cornish poet Charles Causely, born at the end of WW1 and who was a Royal Navy coder during WW2. Gives an insight into the hard life in rural Cornwall during the 1920s and the sacrifices his mother had to make after her husband died from the effects of a WW1 mustard gas exposure.

[edwinrelf_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This novelised semi biography of the Cornish poet Charles Causley is a soft and perhaps too gentle a read. The poet is a real person - 1917-2003 - and at one time was almost the Poet Laurate. The novel imagines the growing up of the boy Charles from the raw facts of his life; his mother Laura of the lower working class - a practical girl in service, of no nonsense, who marries a handsome gentle chap who signs up for WWI, Charles the son is conceived in one of the father’s home leaves, exhausted from the trenches at the front. War over he returns gassed and with tuberculosis. The author reveals a tremendous amount of agapē (unconditional love) within the family. The father dies when Charles is seven – or five.

The mother Laura has become a washerwoman, like her mother. Her son shows early intelligence and sensitivity. For all her poverty, the mother, Laura’ works hard and provides. There is much dignity and love and care – and friendship and honesty with her siblings and the people whose clothes she launders. Charles’s intelligence has him top of the class and then off to Grammar School – sometimes at the mercy of the bovver boys. Being homosexual was something in the early 20th century that boys who were such had little clue about – it, or models to follow. Patrick Gale, the novelist, lets this quality float about and we the reader know a wee bit more about Charles than Charles did of himself.

As his father did Charles goes off to war - as a coder with the Navy. His service is very interesting as background to a life. Unfortunately, we don’t get enough of Charles’s introspection nor of his coming to know, understand, or act on his sexuality and loving. The novelist, perhaps, like the poet probably was, is too coy. The novelist has a get out in that he is not writing pure fiction and Charles Causley – celebrated though he became in literature circles the world over - rejected writing an autobiography – an exposé. “It’s all in the poems”, he is reputed as saying.

Some poems have been added to the text but the reader will have to go elsewhere to find out the real stuff about Charles Causley -- if such exists.

The novel is sweet and with that, disappointing.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Patrick Gale puts the relationship between Charles Causley and his mother at the centre of this loosely biographical novel. Apart from Charles's war-service, they lived together for the whole of their joint lives. Charles's father Charlie was gassed in the First World War and died in the early 1920s.

Laura is the main viewpoint character throughout most of the book, building up our idea of Charles as an intensely private person we can only see from outside. Gale makes her into a very convincing, sympathetic character. In 19th and early 20th century England, "His mother takes in washing" was pretty much the most socially damning thing you could say about someone: laundry work was considered demeaning and humiliating, the last step on the downward ladder before you got to prostitution or the workhouse. But Gale treats Laura more in the way that Zola writes about Gervaise in L'Assommoir, as a self-confident and hardworking professional who has mastered a difficult skill and provides an important service for her clients. She is even allowed to be proud of the high-quality work she does for Launceston's only house of ill repute and to get the best of a snooty churchwarden who isn't happy about the altar-cloths going in the same tub as Ma Treloar's stained sheets.

Charles has to be in the foreground for the wartime chapters, of course, as we follow his naval service as a coder, a job that Gale wants us to see as at least a metaphor for his later work as a poet, if not the thing that actually triggered him into taking his writing in that direction. There's no real evidence one way or the other about Causley's love-life, although there are plenty of ambiguous hints in the poems. Gale uses the freedom he has as a writer of fiction and some slim documentary clues (a letter, and the poem "Angel Hill") to give him a couple of wartime romances with other sailors. Whether or not they really happened in that way, they work in the context of the novel, and they help to give it a bit of shape and create a well-defined ending at the point in 1948 when Causley has settled into his new career as a primary-school teacher and is beginning to publish his first poems.

A very enjoyable and satisfying novel, which I somehow ended up reading the whole of in three sittings (and it's not a short book). So the cover blurb that says "unputdownable" must be fairly near the mark...