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| The Aerodynamics of Pork |  | Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: E P Dutton
Category: Book
List Price: £4.26
Buy Used: £3.17
You Save: £1.09 (26%)
Used (3) from £3.17
Rating:  4 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 052548437X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780525484370
ASIN: 052548437X
Publication Date: December 1988
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Ships from the US. Expected delivery 9-15 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Human, elitiste and exciting! May 26, 2008
Philip Thompson (London)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A posh drama for everyone? Too posh for most! Again Gale has created an engaging story but yet again Gale has created characters we don't like enough to care about and too posh to be likable, there are characters that aren't posh but they are none too likable either. I'm not being elitist just realistic, Brideshead characters were all likeable not like these! Learn a lesson!
Two artists find love in Cornwall December 15, 2006
Benjamin (UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Two interrelated stories run in parallel, one set in London and quickly moving to Cornwall, the other remaining in London. The Cornwall part concerns the Peake family as they prepare for an annual music festival. The Peake Family includes talented violinist, 15 coming on 16 year old Seth Peake, his older sister Venitia with an ever expanding waist, and their liberal minded mother Evelyn. In London the story follows police inspector Mo Faithe, who in addition to chasing criminals pursues her own lesbian interests. The connection between the two stories becomes ever more apparent as events progress.
I found the Cornwall proceedings by far the more compelling, although the London end improved as the connection become clearer. The larger than life characters are interesting, including Bronwen the outspoken and understanding family friend in Cornwall. Seth is particularly appealing, attractive, unusually polite and well mannered, he enjoys a very good relationship with his mother, and an even more interesting relationship with a young man, 21 year old sculptor Roly MacGuire, with whom he falls hopelessly in love.
This is a very warm story, although I found it wavering a little in the early stages, particularly the London connection, but well worth reading.
Don't be put off by the title! October 24, 2005
jfp2006 (PARIS/France)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
It must be admitted that the title of Patrick Gale's first novel, published in 1986, is weird, perhaps even offputtingly so. But the clue to its intepretation would appear to lie in the proverbial "pigs might fly". Which generally implies that what is theoretically possible is, in a pragmatic world, extremely unlikely. And that we should all be getting on with "real life" instead of speculating and dreaming.
But Patrick Gale would appear to be suggesting that such idle musing is precisely what makes life worth living...
This short first novel consists of two intertwined narratives. One, set in Cornwall, revolves around the fifteen-year-old musical prodigy Seth and his elder sister Venetia, a Cambridge undergraduate, the precociously gifted children of bohemian Evelyn; the other, set in London, centres on Mo, a heartily bluff gay policewoman. As such, "The Aerodynamics of Pork" lays the groundwork for Patrick Gale's subsequent work. The narratives are tentatively linked from the beginning, when Mo witnesses Evelyn as the unwitting victim of a pickpocket, through various common features (such as kippers...) to the imminent interaction of the characters in the final section, corresponding to the birthdays of both Seth and Mo.
The novel is a clever study in subversion and subterfuge. The echoes are discreet and varied, but the most obvious parallel is that between the incipient gay relationships between Mo and Hope in London and between Seth and Roly on the Cornish coast. These are set against the background of other problematic relationships, most notably that between Evelyn and her mysteriously absent husband, Huw.
If this is an "apprentice work", then it is quite clearly a very good one for a writer then only in his mid-twenties. It looks forward to the emotional complexities of Patrick Gale's later fiction, most notably in the wonderful "Rough Music", in which Roly reappears.
Patrick Gale is a strangely underrated writer, and one who will hopefully come to greater prominence in the years ahead.
 Happy, frivolous, peculiar, surprising - a must! May 2, 2001
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
I'm really shocked to find there's no review of this book on Amazon. I read it when it first came out - and have read it many times since.It's a delicious collision of the English middle class, magical realism, and within the many threads of the plot, delicious romance - both gay and straight. Most novels - and if you browse through Amazon's gay & lesbian list, you begin to think all novels - begin by creating a coherent and believable world which is then torn apart and destroyed. In the Aerodynamics of Pork, the world starts incoherently, and as the story progresses, through some wonderfully impossible and magical twists and turns, threads draw together, and everyone's problems evaporate. It's an incredibly uplifting experience, very funny, and very gripping. All the way through the book, Patrick Gale makes the most uncannily brilliant use of music. Central to the plot, as it roughly centres around a music festival in Cornwall, if you know the pieces he uses, you'll find them ringing round your head as you read. Quite amazing. But more than anything, you come away feeling that pigs really might fly, that your own life could take a magical turn at any point, and you'll come out ten times more optimistic than when you started. Read it!
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