A Perfectly Good Man

This month's book was "A Perfectly Good Man" by Patrick Gale. It is the story of Barnaby Johnson, a Cornish parish priest, and spans his life from aged 8 to late middle age. It is written in a series of chapters from the point of view of different characters: Barnaby, his wife, his children, his lover, and the son he has by his lover. Gale is such a clever writer - the chapters jump back and forth in time, in no apparent order, and the reader is kept wondering how all the twists and turns will be reconciled. However, all the loose ends are neatly tidied away most satisfactorily at the end.

  The story opens with the suicide of Lenny, who has been crippled in an accident on the rugby field. He decides at aged 20 that he wishes to commit suicide. He obtains the necessary drugs, and asks to Barnaby to go and see him at the time he plans to take the drugs, so that he has a witness. Spoiler alert coming up! Lennie does not know that Barnaby is his father, and nor does the reader till much later in the book. The book is the back story of Barnaby and Lennie.
  Another contributing character is the extremely unpleasant Modest Carlsson, a second-hand book seller and dealer in pornography. He meets Barnaby when the latter is a young curate, and becomes obsessed with him to the extent that he follows him to Cornwall. He is the complete antithesis to the 'perfectly good man' that Barnaby is.
  I think the characterisations are marvellous, all the characters seem to leap off the page, well rounded and quite believable. We all liked Barnaby, though one or two of our readers responded to him in the same way as does his adopted Vietnamese boat-boy son, Phuc or Jim, finding him too diffident, and wishing he would be less accepting of everything, even the awful Modest. He is even asked by an uncle at aged 8, 'Please don't feel you always have to be good. Sometimes you are so good it hurts to watch you.'
  Being set in Cornwall, the cake was Cornish heavy cake, which is actually mentioned in the book. Probably the fault of the cook, but it was possibly the most boring cake ever made, though the birds enjoyed it very much!