Port Mungo

By Patrick McGrath

During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow.

Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue.

Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9780385673723

Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was a Medical Superintendent. He has lived in various parts of North America and spent several years on a remote island in the north Pacific. He moved to New York City in 1981. He is the author of The Grotesque Spider, Dr. Haggard's Disease, Asylum, and Martha Peake. He lives in New York and London and is married to actress Maria Aitken.

Reviews for Port Mungo

[bookmarque · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Patrick McGrath is master of the unreliable narrator. His skill is applied with precision and deliberation. Even though I know Gin is unreliable, her judgment and opinions to be taken with the mightiest grain of salt, he eventually lulls me into complacence. I fall under a spell of sorts and frame my perceptions to align with Gin’s; no matter that I know better. And in the end, when McGrath pulls the curtain back to reveal the truth I knew was there all along, I’m still astonished. I also know and love McGrath’s adept use of foreshadowing and I shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens, but yet I am.This is my fifth McGrath novel and even though his style pervades, he manages to create widely diverse situations and characters. This time we have a couple of ill-fated lovers who indulge in a very 1950s style of bohemian living. Typical enough, but the circumstances are tilted and the narrator of their story definitely biased. She is willfully blind to her brother Jack’s faults. She willfully scandalizes Vera, his lover and mother of his children. She willfully aggrandizes his art and his calling. He is the perfect father and brother at all times. Even his faults are made magnificent and part of his higher calling. We know this cannot be true, but still, McGrath makes it all seem so reasonable. So right.The descriptions of life in the wretched Port Mungo are shrouded by the mists of time and distance. We weren’t there. Our narrator wasn’t either, but yet we find the expected truth of what we’re told comforting. Of course Jack is an exile; he wants perfection and won’t settle for anything less. Artistic credibility and integrity are noble pursuits indeed. Vera’s abandonment of him and their daughters is almost on cue. We expect it and raise Jack even higher in our esteem in the face of her cowardice and selfishness.But then the cracks appear. Why did Jack so easily let Anna, his surviving daughter, go to his proper, upstanding brother Gerald? This in the face of the zeal with which he persevered as Peg’s father; his martyrly devotion to show up Vera’s shortcomings so starkly. Why has his return to the New York art scene been so tepid and lackluster? Why has Vera continued to fall back into his life with such unexpected regularity? Why does Anna display behavior so contrary to her Sussex upbringing? The façade crumbles and reality is bathed in the full light of Vera’s scorn and Gin’s disbelief. Very well done and an intriguing, hypnotic tale. The Rathbone Curse indeed.