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Overview
Patrick McGrath is a writer of astonishing accomplishment: “fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore,” according to Tobias Wolff, with “the drive and suspense of the most shameless thriller [and] the inevitability of myth.”Port Mungo, his sixth novel, is a harrowing story of art and love, and of a family cursed by both. Throughout a privileged, eccentric childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister, Gin. So at art school in London, she is pained to see him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a spectacularly bohemian painter with whom he soon runs off to New York City. From a bruised, bereft distance, Gin follows their southward progress through Miami and prerevolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps along the Gulf of Honduras. Here Jack discovers himself as an artist, and begins to work with a fervor as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera gradually succumbs, and which not even the births of two daughters can help to subdue.
Patrick McGrath’s mesmerizing narrative tracks these lives from the fifties in England to the nineties in Manhattan: the latter-day Gauguin; his buccaneering mate; the girls, Peg and Anna, left adrift in their wake; and Gin herself, their painstaking chronicler, whose house in Greenwich Village eventually becomes a haven for them all.
This feverish world of tropical impulses, artistic ambition, and love both reckless and enduring leads the Rathbones, ultimately, to a death swathed in mystery, and to another similarly bound in complicit secrecy, as the imperatives of passion, narcissism, and creativity hold each of them—and the reader—in relentless thrall.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
In a seedy river town on the Gulf of Honduras, Jack Rathbone believed he had found a place that would give him and his lover, the accomplished artist Vera Savage, the solitude they would need to create a body of work that would shake the art world to its core. But in a place where time lies thicker than the mangrove swamps that surround it, Jack and Vera discover an emotional frontier more fearsome, untamed, and dangerous than any wilderness.
Told through the voice of Jack’s adoring sister, Gin, Port Mungo is the riveting story of this ill-fated couple, one that begins as a bohemian flight-of-fancy before unraveling into a dark, debauched and sinister tale. With Port Mungo, the incomparable Patrick McGrath, author of the acclaimed novels Spider and Asylum, delivers a spellbinding narrative to explore the obsessive pursuit of art and love.
The New York Times - Christopher Benfey
At the end of this immensely clever and tautly composed novel, the admiring reader may be left with a corresponding shadow of a doubt. Is Port Mungo a seriously meant meditation on the shadowy wellsprings of art and love, its carefully contrasted characters embodying the fraught polarities of this radioactive field? Or is it, rather, a cunningly contrived device of smoke and mirrors, with secrets passing for mysteries, and gothic conventions -- doubles, ghosts and family curses (the ''curse of the Rathbones'' is invoked for good measure) -- smuggled in for added frissons? Well, as Eduardo might say, that's art. For what is art, finally, if not a contrivance in which one is gradually brought to believe?
Editorials
The New Yorker
McGrath’s latest foray into macabre psychology examines one obsessive relationship through the lens of another. The novel is narrated by Gin Rathbone, who has lived her life in thrall to her younger brother, Jack, a famous painter now ailing and in her care. She tells the story of their eccentric, motherless childhood in England, a period that ends when Jack falls for a magnetic, promiscuous older artist named Vera Savage. Jack settles with Vera first in New York, then in the ramshackle Central American river town of the title. Gin’s account of their extravagantly tempestuous life is full of adulation of him and hatred of Vera, whom she blames for his misfortunes. However, a series of shocking dénouements show us the extent of Gin’s delusions about her brother and, in McGrath’s virtuosic handling, make for a compelling piece of family Gothic.Christopher Benfey
At the end of this immensely clever and tautly composed novel, the admiring reader may be left with a corresponding shadow of a doubt. Is Port Mungo a seriously meant meditation on the shadowy wellsprings of art and love, its carefully contrasted characters embodying the fraught polarities of this radioactive field? Or is it, rather, a cunningly contrived device of smoke and mirrors, with secrets passing for mysteries, and gothic conventions -- doubles, ghosts and family curses (the ''curse of the Rathbones'' is invoked for good measure) -- smuggled in for added frissons? Well, as Eduardo might say, that's art. For what is art, finally, if not a contrivance in which one is gradually brought to believe?— The New York Times