Rough Music (50 page)

Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion

1. How do the three quotations at the beginning of the novel relate to your understanding of the book’s themes and characters?
   

2. The novel’s alternating chapters underscore the contrast between children’s and adults’ perspectives on the world. In what other ways does the novel suggest that children and adults often have very different realities?
   

3. Most of
   Rough Music
   is set on and around the beach in Cornwall. How does the beach—the ocean itself, the shoreline, the sand—function in the novel?
   

4. Memory is at the heart of this novel, both in terms of the Pagetts’ recollections of their summer at Beachcomber and Frances’s Alzheimer’s. Do you see any connections between these two kinds of remembering? What kind of personal issues seem to be at stake in the suppression and failure of memory?
   

5. What role do nostalgia and homesickness play in the novel?
   

6. Prisons and various kinds of imprisonment are recurring themes in
   Rough Music
   . Which characters are most concerned with rules and boundaries? How do family and marriage seem to confine certain characters?
   

7. In what ways does language have a capacity to incriminate the novel’s characters? In what ways does it help to liberate them?
   

8. When Julian frees Lady Percy on the beach, he says, “Go … Quick. Before they can catch you again.” What exactly is he trying to accomplish by releasing his pet? How does this event reflect his changing sense of the world?
   

9. How would you describe the betrayals—both intentional and otherwise—that occur in
   Rough Music
   ? Do you think the novel suggests that at least some of these betrayals are inevitable?
   

10. Skip and Julian’s new names represent an attempt to begin new lives—a reflection of Frances’s hopeful “Clean slates all round?” What do you make of this concept and of the particular name changes?
    

11. Julian’s enrolment into the Barrowcester Choir School is somewhat mysterious. What do you imagine is behind this dramatic development? How does Julian’s time at the school seem to shape him?
    

12. The book plays games with gender roles and with perceived norms of masculinity and femininity. How do Julian’s ideas about his own sexuality and maleness develop against this background?
    

13. How would you characterize our expectations for the novel’s female characters? How do they differ from our expectations for the male characters?
    

14. What does “Rough Music,” the sculpture, signal or represent for the novel’s characters and for us as readers? Do you think the title has another significance?
    

15. How do you feel about the novel’s ending? If you were going to write an afterword, what would it contain?
    

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 2000 by Patrick Gale
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by Lillian Dean and The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in 2000 in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

www.randomhouse.com/brc/

A Library of Congress Catalog Card Number is available from the publisher.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49031-5

v3.0