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Summary: A sensitive portrait of a tortured artist
Review: The artistic temperament and love's journey is at the heart of this eloquently written novel from Patrick McGrath. I must confess that unlike some of the other reviewers, I have not read any of McGrath's "gothic" novels, so I came to Port Mungo with a willingness to experience something totally new. Port Mungo is a dark, somber story that deals with the shifting web of dysfunctional family turbulence and deception. A portrait of the painter, Jack Rathbone is at the heart of this story - an ambiguous, tortured, complex, and multi-faceted hero. The story is told in the first person by Jack's loyal sister, Gin, who not only offers her opinions on Jack's wayward ways and his relationship with fellow artist Vera Savage, but views much of the action through hearsay and conversations that she has with Jack later in life. Vera, a rough-hewn, man-chasing alcoholic from Glasgow tempts Jack, just seventeen but already fired with ambition, to flee the suffocating confines of London for the broader canvas of New York. Disappointed by the ''phonies and losers'' they encounter in the Lower Manhattan of the 1950's, they travel farther south, first to pre-Revolutionary Havana and then to Pelican Road, Port Mungo, in search of artistic enlightenment where they can shed their civilized selves and plug into a more primal source of energy. In seedy Port Mungo, painting in a ''wreck of a house that lurched precariously over the river,'' Jack finds what he's after and Vera gives up painting for more drink and shabby affairs. Their daughter Peg, neglected by Vera, is left to her own ends and becomes wayward, "primitive" and almost uncontrollable - becoming a smoker at seven years old and a drinker at eight. When Peg drowns in strange circumstances at the age of sixteen and her body is found floating face up among the mangroves, both Jack and Vera embark on a life of blame and soul searching. When Anna, a second daughter appears twenty years later, and demands to know what happened, the mystery of Peg's death, and the dysfunctional relationship that Jack and Vera had with Peg is gradually revealed. Vera has her own take on what happened among the mangroves and we finally learn the truth that Jack is a ''third-rate artist'' who fled to Port Mungo because he was ''scared to show his stuff where it mattered.'' And we learn, too, her devastating alternative explanation of the image that haunts Jack's mature work - ''a drowned girl gazing up at him from a tangle of underwater roots.'' Port Mungo has a shifting, mellifluous narrative that is, at once, confusing and beguiling. McGrath is more concerned with understanding artistic truth and psychological truth, than just giving an undemanding and unchallenging account of one family's problems. Gin remains the psychological center of the novel, and when she complains to her former lover, the sculptor Eduardo Byrne that Vera and Jack don't really love each other but instead suffer from a shared pathology. Eduardo responds, with ''that's just love." Port Mungo is a tight and tautly composed novel that provides a solemn deliberation and says some interesting things about the indistinguishable themes of art and love. Mike Leonard July 04.
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Summary: There Are No Mysteries, Only Secrets
Review: Virginia "Gin" Rathbone loves her seventeen-year-old artistic brother a bit too much, so when thirty year old, bawdy and tawdry Vera Savage sweeps him off his feet and together the flee London in the early '60s for the art scene in New York, she is upset enough to eventually follow. However the couple soon leaves New York, first for Havana, then to the back water Honduran city of Port Mungo, a steamy and seedy place if ever there was one.
They move into a dilapidated house by a river, where Jack finds what he needs to paint, but where Vera gives up painting, becoming even more tawdry and bawdry, having numerous affairs. They have a daughter, Peg, who they neglect and who becomes almost feral, smoking at seven, drinking at eight. She is definitely different.
When Gin comes to visit, she observes Jack removing a thorn from Peg's foot by sucking it out, almost incestuous. Sadly Peg drowns when she is sixteen and her body is found floating in the mangroves. The death seems mysterious, secrets abound. After Peg's death Jack and Gin's elusive brother Gerald takes Peg's much younger sister, Anna, to England to be raised.
Peg's death destroys whatever relationship Jack and Vera had, giving Gin what she's wanted from the start, Jack all to herself, but like that old clich? goes, "You should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it."
There is much more to this story about a tortured artist and his tempestuous life. The book is narrated by Gin, who states that "There are no mysteries, only people who conceal; only secrets." And from this point on the rest of the book will be about secrets coming to light. And I shouldn't forget to mention Anna, the younger sister who went away. She comes back, almost like an avenging angel.
This story is certainly disturbing. It starts out that way and stays that way throughout. However it's an excellent story about a painter who has more ambition than talent and about how he affects the lives of those in his orbit. And, disturbing or not, this book is so well written, the characters so real and life like, that I carried them around with me for days after I finished the story. "Port Mungo" is what fine Novel writing is all about.
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