Note that this is a reissue so make sure you haven't already read it. It is funny in spots but it's not the best portrayal of a village.

Patrick Gale (or perhaps his greedy publisher?) hasn't done himself any favours by republishing this early novel (1988 I believe) as it’s a bizarre little tale which shows none of the considerable novelist’s skills evident in his later works. In this one he plays it all for laughs – only unfortunately it’s not very funny. A comedy of manners – without the comedy. An American academic, celebrated for a book about hell, is now researching one about heaven and has come to a traditional English cathedral town to do some research. There he meets with a cast of eccentric characters and has a few brushes with the supernatural. I found it all very tedious. The “sparky” dialogue, the silly sub-plots (although surely keeping an AIDS diagnosis secret can in no way be considered amusing), and the inevitable prejudices and conventions of clergy and small town life (Trollope without the wit, insight and empathy) all make for an unsatisfactory read, and I can’t help feeling it should have been allowed to fade into decent obscurity.

Books like this one are...what do I want to say...an acquired taste? Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. While I can't imagine that this novel will be for everyone, there were certain parts of it that were definitely appealing. I liked the oddball humor and the imperfections of the characters. If you like it when the story is unpredictable and the characters don't seem to fit in any particular stereotype, then this might just be the book you've been looking for.

The setting is great, offering all the typical British ideals and the descriptions make the story, in my opinion. Set in the 80's, this might not have the same believable quality that a more modern book would have, but I found that to be part of its charm. It's different, and sometimes that can be a good thing.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

A new author for me....looking forward to more of Mr Gale's work. Loved this story.

I was confused by the title of Facing the Tank, Patrick Gale’s novel of 1980’s life in beautiful Barrowcester (pronounced Brewster), a provincial cathedral town that is sadly fictional. It is one of those towns that populate British fiction where social mores are skewered with equal parts humor and compassion. The authors pen is sharp and sometimes wicked, but they cannot help loving their imperfect people.

Like most of its kind, Facing the Tank is full of characters who are going about their multiple story lines, crossing over here and there, connecting and socializing and commenting on each other, but often completely unaware of each other’s reality, despite the frequent gossiping. We start with the out of town visitor, Evan. He’s an American expert on angels and demons and his presence gave me the completely wrong impression at first, I was beginning to expect some sort of horror story. Thankfully, the humorous cast of Gale’s descriptions cleared that up quickly.

He stays with Mercedes, a Spanish landlady, a woman of mystery even to herself as she has had amnesia for nearly 30 years. Her daughter is pregnant by a Roman Catholic Cardinal and the papers are camping on the front steps. There’s Gavin, the local bishop whose shocked society with a fiery extemporaneous sermon discovering angel wings in the tomb of the local cathedral’s saint while his mother is having seances. There’s a Satinist housekeeper whose looking for the perfect incantation to find her lost daughter. There’s the hilarious Lydia and Clive, ostensibly open-minded and liberal until their gay son decides to marry a black woman. More seriously, he lies to his fiancée about his AIDS test imagining her as the first woman to test positive for AIDS and being greeted by cheers. The gay interior designer’s partner recently died of cancer, not AIDS, but he tells his lover’s family it was AIDS, angered by their not-so-subtly homophobic dismissal of him. Meanwhile Lydia is matchmaking him with a local young woman and his mother is losing her mind to senility.

So much is happening, some of it quite awful and some of it very funny, for example, a thirteen year old student imagines he may have impregnated the family dog because she happened to come in the room and lick him while he was masturbating. Lydia and Clive’s wedding preparations are everything racist condescension could create, with all the recipes taken from a book on Caribbean cooking to dressing down because they cannot imagine wealthy black people and desperately not wanting to make the bride’s parents feel poor.



Facing the Tank is the first book by Patrick Gale I have read, which is good news because that means I can expect to read several more good books in the future. From looking at his bibliography, several are in Barrowcester. I am glad, I want to know what happens to some of these folks after the book. This is not a book that winds up every single storyline, though I will assure you that Crispin’s Lottie did not have puppies with human faces.

While Facing the Tank does a great job of satirizing the foibles and prejudices of the comfortably off, this is not a story firmly rooted in reality and I don’t just mean the seances.The reason for the title is a bit ridiculous, but explaining it would be a spoiler, I think, so I will just say, undertakers can remove things from people’s hands after death. They will just break the bones if necessary. They won’t make a bigger coffin. I also think having a character keep an AIDS diagnosis secret is too problematic to let it just lie there unquestioned.

There is this odd mix of humor and harrowing what with scary things in the river under the cathedral and the Satanist’s pregnancy and loss of her daughter. This is more than a comedy of manners and sometimes the mix is just right and sometimes it’s a bit off.

I think the “if you liked that, then you will like this” algorithms work better for music than books. I am more often led astray by the assurance that liking one book makes my enjoyment of another nearly a certainty, nonetheless when a marketing coordinator reached out to me via email suggesting I might like Facing the Tank because I liked The Sea Change, I thought why not? I am glad I did. I really enjoyed this book and want to read more.

I was provided a promotional copy of Facing the Tank by the publisher through NetGalley

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed all Patrick Gale's books since I first encountered him some years back. However this book (originally published in the late 1980s, I understand) is very different from the others I've read. Although well written, I found it hard to follow with long chapters introducing a range of characters. It is in a very different style from the others and therefore didn't really appeal to me.

4.5 stars. My only previous experience of Gale's novels is his most recent, 'A Place Called Winter', which I really loved. This, Gale's 4th book from way back in 1988, couldn't have been more different, but I was almost equally enchanted. A modern gloss on Trollope (although Stella Gibson and E. F. Benson have also been invoked as possible influences), it is a fun and funny tale, with a multitude of eccentric characters inhabiting a quaint English town called Barrowcester. My major qualm is that there are perhaps TOO many characters, and I had a bit of difficulty keeping them straight all through the long haul. Also, there were a LOT of issues that were so obliquely resolved that I am none too sure I QUITE 'got it': the entire sub-plot surrounding Dawn Harper trying to summon her 'missing' daughter Sasha with Satanic incantations ; the white doves arising from the tomb of Saint Boniface and the possible angelic bones therein; what really happened to Evan's manuscript, etc. But I look forward to reading more, indeed, maybe all of Gale's back catalog, on the basis of the two I've now read.

My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Open Road Media for the free reading copy in exchange for this honest review.

3.5 stars.

What was I expecting? I’m not quite sure, but it wasn’t this: a profoundly quirky exploration of purpose, love and belonging in a small country town, where normal life is thrown into disarray by something which might just be a miracle.


Barrowcester (pronunced ‘Brewster’) is an English cathedral town, the kind of quaint place which pulls in foreign tourists by the coachload to admire its historic buildings and makes a comfortable living through the sale of cream teas and fudge. Yet to live there is to negotiate a whole skein of unspoken rules and obligations, as the American academic Evan Kirby discovers when he arrives to research his latest book. Evan specialises in the history of ideas and, following on from his successful first book on the history of hell, he has inevitably moved on to exploring heaven in the sequel. His personal life, however, is very far from heaven. Released from an unsatisfying marriage by divorce, he finds himself floundering in the unaccustomed state of freedom and has come to Barrowcester as a way to escape the trials of the world, and make progress on his manuscript.

Alongside Evan, we meet various members of Barrowcester society, who find themselves in a similar moment of transition. Beneath the placid surface of this community, waters run deep. There’s Emma, coming to terms with the recent death of her father, and trying to decide whether she wants to spend the rest of her life living in his shadow. It would be easy to carry on as the late Dean’s spinster daughter, but Emma finds herself longing for more. Across town, her godson Crispin is settling in – uneasily – to his first term at the boarding school Tatham’s, haunted by a very unfortunate encounter with his beloved spaniel. The interior designer Fergus is trying to rebuild his life in the absence of his partner, and struggling with the recent arrival of his elderly and increasingly difficult mother. For Dawn, who has become a Satanist in the absence of any other options, a long-standing prayer is about to be answered.

But there are two key arrivals whose impact will nudge the community out of its comfortable complacency. One is a prodigal: Madeleine Merluza (the not-so-penitent Magdalen), who returns to her mother’s house bristling with defiance after accidentally getting knocked up by a cardinal (hey, these things happen). As the neighbours relish the scandal, and the local press descends on Madeleine’s doorstep, Madeleine herself begins to be disarmed by her mother’s scholarly American lodger. As for the other arrival, perhaps he’d never even left. When the cathedral decides to relocate the tomb of their patron saint, St Boniface, strange things begin to occur. A flight of doves arises from the tomb; apparitions of enormously tall blond men start to appear across the town; and, most troubling of all, the Bishop – the troubled rationalist Gavin Tree – finds himself trying to explain a saint’s body which features a seven-foot-tall skeleton with wings.

Barrowcester is about to witness a period of thorough, but very genteel confusion. As change sweeps outward from the cathedral, the residents and visitors find themselves coming together in new and unexpected ways, and being forced to confront the outer world in a way that simply hasn’t ever happened before. The result is heart-warming but definitely different. It reminded me of something I can’t quite put my finger on, but the closest I can get to is Mr Golightly’s Holiday meets Midsomer Murders, without the murders. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that there are deeper layers of allegory and meaning that I haven’t caught first time round.

Having come to this without having read any Patrick Gale before, and therefore having no preconceptions about his work, I enjoyed it but couldn’t help feeling a little baffled at the end – I hesitate to say it was anticlimactic, but there was a slight element of, ‘Oh, is that it?’ Nevertheless, Gale has absolutely captured the parochial nature of small towns and villages, the subtle hierarchies that dictate society, and the gossip and secrets that bubble under the surface. He’s then ramped everything up to eleven and added a good dash of spiritual enigma for good measure, but it’s done with a gentle wit that’s very appealing. I think A Place Called Winter might be somewhat less bubbly and more serious, but on the basis of Facing the Tank, I’m very keen to start reading as soon as I’m home.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/04/05/facing-the-tank-patrick-gale/