Patrick McGrath: Port Mungo

Reviewed by BEN NAPARSTEK

Patrick McGrath writes the kind of claustrophobic, cobwebbed period pieces that make rich seedbeds for a filmmaker such as David Cronenberg (who recently brought his Spider to the screen) but which Merchant-Ivory would keep well shy of.

Port Mungo is his first novel to inhabit a contemporary stage. A turbulent, grisly excursion into the personal consequences of artistic commitment, the novel unfolds with the fevered delirium of a painting from its protagonist Jack's malarial phase, in which the dominant impression was of heat, sickness, darkness, decay.

Port Mungo charts the steady degeneration of a tempestuous relationship, from when raffish prodigy art student Jack Rathbone meets Vera Savage, an established painter and flamboyant lush 13 years his senior.

From the shark-infested waters of the Manhattan art scene, the couple head south to a seedy Honduran backwater where, away from civilisation, they unshackle their primordial impulses. Yet the bohemian idealism of the couple prematurely dries up beneath the Honduran sun. The shambling river town spells the kiss of death for Vera's career and Jack's descent into bestiality.

Their daughter, Peg, is reared in the decaying
converted banana warehouse, a barefoot creature of the tropical wilderness. The question of whether human inadequacy is a prerequisite for the creation of great art might seem a weathered inquiry to govern a novel. But what makes Port Mungo far more than a mere reconfiguration of the self-destructive-genius chestnut is the ambiguity in which McGrath enshrouds Jack's character.

Another equally possible gloss emerges from beneath the paean that Gin, Jack's adoring sister and the narrator of Port Mungo peddles — that of a middling talent whose aspirations are not matched by his ability.

Gin's confidence in her brother comes across as too forced and insistent, as though nagging doubts are forever being suppressed. Momentary anxieties float to the surface about Jack's possible implication in his feral child's drowning and are immediately thrust back under.

Given the quasi-incestuous bond Gin has shared with Jack since early childhood, it only makes sense that she should fiercely beat the drum for her brother while incriminating Vera as her slatternly rival.

Yet while McGrath blasts away at the stubborn illusions of his unreliable narrator, he refuses to posit a definitive interpretation of events in their place, ensuring that truth remains as muddy and opaque as the mangrove swamps that haunt Gin's tale.

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: $34.95

* Ben Naparstek is a freelance journalist