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Port Mungo
By Patrick McGrath
Patrick McGrath is a master of the unreliable narrator. Using storytellers whose version is suspect, he creates fiction that is both taut with suspense and psychologically rich. The best example may be Asylum, in which a dour psychiatrist wears a mask of detachment as he details the story of a colleague's wife and her descent into madness.
In his latest book, Port Mungo, Freud is once again in the shadows - as well he might be, given that McGrath is the son of a psychiatrist. This time a proper Englishwoman, Virginia Rathbone, tells a sad tale. Gin, as she's called, grew up and trained as an artist with her adored younger brother, Jack. Years later, his life and work have gone to dust, and she's puzzling over what happened.
Where Jack was obsessed with art, Gin is obsessed with Jack, falling into his forceful orbit. So it is traumatic for her when, at 17, he runs off with another artist, an older woman from America with an aptly descriptive name, Vera Savage. Eventually Gin follows the pair to the States, settling in Manhattan. But, as if to escape her clutches, Jack and Vera retreat even further, to the Honduran outpost that gives the book its title.
Port Mungo: The prominence given this isolated, desultory place underlines the book's theme of psychological disarray. Gin herself is a piece of work, as cold and calculating as her brother is impulsive. Meanwhile, a lack of discipline and love of booze doom Jack's career, in spite of his efforts to pioneer a style he calls "tropicalism" and his sense of himself as a latter-day Gauguin. His wife's frequent absences and infidelity are a drawback, too, leaving Jack as primary parent to the couple's daughters, Peg and Anna.
During a visit to Port Mungo, Gin watches as Jack grabs Peg's dirty foot and sucks out a thorn. Later, she recalls the moment as a sign that locale and lifestyle have muted her brother's "civilized reflexes."
Yet, as the reader clearly sees, Jack's problems began long ago. The psycho-sexual dynamics between brother and sister set the stage for other bizarre intimacies.
Port Mungo is a compelling read, but not an entirely satisfactory one. The first problem is that the reader can figure out before Gin the logical outcome of the story. Second, Jack is such an unlikable character that his failure stirs no regrets. And Gin herself, an enabler if there ever was one, likewise can't provoke a tear.
- Ellen Emry Heltzel is co-author with Margo Hammond of the Internet column Book Babes, which can be found at www.poynter.org
- "Port Mungo," by Patrick McGrath, Knopf, $24, 241 pages.