Customer Reviews

Port Mungo

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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.

Patrick McGrath finds genetic seeds for characters who border on the edge of maladaptation or evil or amorality. PORT MUNGO follows the line of his successful THE ASYLUM, DR. HAGGARD'S DISEASE, MARTHA PEAKE, and SPIDER, and despite the fact that he can be considered the progenitor for unlikable characters, he explores the psyches of these odd creatures with such skill that their darker sides often mesmerize us.

Jack Rathbone is a 17-year-old youth in the UK who aspires to be an artist and lives with his sister Gin (the narrator of the story) who is devoted to her younger brother in a near pathologic manner. Jack encounters Vera Savage, an exotic bohemian painter from Scotland who is well shown in the UK, and falls under the spell of his older chanteuse/alcoholic/free love personage. The two become entwined as sexual partners and Jack encourages Vera to move to New York where they will open an 'American Studio' in the wildness of a new country and Jack will learn painting (and other lessons) from Vera.

Once in Manhattan their painting is delayed by Vera's insatiable need to be the center of attention among new artsy acquaintances and her alcoholism triggers periods of absence. Feeling confined by New York the two decide to seek other locations to pursue their art, and after a brief stay in Havana, Cuba they find the perfect isolation in Port Mungo - a seedy, smarmy, decadent Maughamesque spot in the Gulf of Honduras. There they paint, drink, carouse, and while Jack develops a painting style of 'tropicalism', Vera begins to follow her sexual needs in adventures away from Port Mungo. Always reuniting after these trysts and fights, they eventually have a daughter Peg and some years later another daughter Anna. Vera soon deserts her family, leaving Jack (and on occasion his sister Gin) to raise the girls. Peg is more in the mold of her mother and is worshipped by Jack, but Peg dies in a quasi-mysterious fashion plunging Jack into a deep depression.

Jack returns to New York to live with his sister Gin, and scathing rumors result in daughter Anna being adopted by her uncle who sees Jack as an inadequate parent. Time passes until Anna returns as a young woman to re-enter Jack's life - older, wiser, and needy. From this point on the story passes rapidly, enriched by characters who all deftly interplay with the strange history of what really happened in Port Mungo. Vera's absence is explained, Peg's death is clarified, and the true nature of each of these fascinating characters is painted before our eyes.

McGrath leaves no one free of fault, of the ability to have a dark side, or to demonstrate that their chameleon lives can shed a dermis to reveal the core animal beneath. He writes so well that once the story is started it is difficult to put aside, so wary are we of the tension always mounting. He understands art and the artistic mind and has depicted the artist/model relationship as well as anyone writing today. You may not like the characters in this book, but they will remain indelibly stamped on your mind. Here is another fine work by one of our better novelists writing today.

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.

Ever since his debut, British novelist Patrick McGrath has set for himself an unnervingly narrow limitation to follow. Each of his Gothic novels makes use of the old convention of the unreliable narrator: the person telling the story either is not acquainted with all the facts of the tale, or is, for his own reasons, deliberately falsifying them.

There is an obvious danger here. McGrath is in a sense writing the same book each time out. We all know, starting a new novel of his, what to expect. The narrator can't be trusted, so the solution to the mystery must be the opposite of what we're told.

Until now, McGrath has managed quite well to surprise his readers. Even in his last book, "Martha Peake," he was able to pull a rabbit out of his hat at the very last minute. Unfortunately, he has now published his first failure with "Port Mungo."

I won't go into detail about the plot--you can read a synopsis elsewhere. Suffice it to say that readers already familiar with McGrath's modus operandi will know very early on in "Port Mungo" what is really happening. It makes the rest of the book quite dull, following the characters to a foregone conclusion.

And that isn't all. The characters themselves are not very well fleshed out. We spend the entire novel in Gin's brain, as it were, but never learn much of anything about her. Another vastly important character, Gin and Jack's responsible elder brother, is basically ignored. And so on.

I could add other points. The main setting, Port Mungo itself, is never resolved into a real place, but remains an impressionistic smudge. Worse, McGrath's sense of dark humor is almost entirely absent, giving the novel an absurdly self-serious air. These are not very nice people we meet in the book; a little humor would have gone a long way to improving it.

I don't want to give the impression that "Port Mungo" is awful. McGrath is too talented a writer to fail entirely, and I don't grudge the time I spent reading the book. Nevertheless, it is too, too familiar, the work of an excellent artist repeating earlier ideas. Those new to McGrath, of course, may very well get more out of the book than I did. But established fans will be disappointed.

Patrick McGrath is known for his excellent prose, albeit the subject matter is often quite bizarre if not downright surreal. Unfortunately 'Port Mungo' demonstrates that even the best authors can produce mediocre novels. Oh, the author does produce some interesting characters, mostly artists, unusual locales (Port Mungo sounds like a tropical hell-hole), and ultimately there is some drama. But the narrative is so ... *average*. McGrath normally writes heavenly prose, the sort that demands to be read aloud. 'Port Mungo' is of much lesser quality, ... I don't understand this at all. And the author chose to be too cautious in unraveling the story. There is too much artistic mumbo-jumbo and not enough action to sustain the reader. Finally when there is drama it seems misplaced and forced.


Bottom line: a somewhat dull, borderline pretentious work by the normally reliable McGrath. Not recommended.

Although it covers much of the same ground. "Asylum" was a real corker, if depressing in spots.
"Port Mungo" is more leisurely and unfocused. I think the author intended the sister/narrator to be a bit more omninous than I found her. The hard-drinking, wild loving Vera character, much better portrayed as a repressed wife let loose with her lover in "Asylum," is less of a factor here.

If you are just starting out with this author, I say, read "Ayslum"!

McGrath's overbaked novel is long on intense psychological scrutiny and short on artistic authenticity, or character development. This is surprising, considering the author's reputation for fleshing out fictional figures. But much of this novel is plain fatuous, unsure and uninformed about the true lives of painters and the art they make. McGrath is unable to at all communicate much about the paintings that his various characters supposedly live through--a large error in such a work in which the comprehension of the players is insistently said to exist in their art. This gambit falls flat. For a book with such alluring locations as post-war London, Abstract Expressionist New York in the 1950s and 60s, and a far-flung tropical port, there is a disappointing and ultimately lazy lack of local color, atmosphere, and description, in favor of endless musings about characters, and their self-importance, characters who grow less likable and compelling page after page. Forget the plot. The ending is an attempt at the dramatic macabre but is plain ridiculous and unbelievable--it inspires giggles not chills. Worse--in one of the few actual artistic references the author cites Manet instead of Monet--a freshman art history error. Enough. Leave Port Mungo and its simmering simplicities alone. I took it to Bermuda on the recommendation of esteemed critics in London's Observer on Sunday, and ended up throwing it out the window. Should have stuck with Iris Murdoch...
Jason Rosenfeld

In his five previous novels (most notably "Asylum") Patrick McGrath has proven to be an author who writes with compelling intensity, fashioning a love story that haunts and surprises. He's a master at painting tragedy where one least expects to find it. This, for many, may be the fascination of "Port Mungo."

Told largely in flashbacks this is the saga of the Rathbones. Jack, a young painter is adored and cosseted by his older sister, Gin. Theirs is a privileged existence. While attending art school in London 17-year-old Jack is besotted by Vera Savage, an older avant garde painter. The pair leave what they consider to be the suffocating confines of London for New York City. Once there, Jack "could see no earthly reason why, with Vera beside him, he should not achieve all he knew he had it in him to achieve."

But New York doesn't prove to be the haven or inspiration he had imagined, and the pair flee to the South, very far South, Honduras, to a fictional town, Port Mungo, "a once prosperous river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras."

Gin visits there only once for a period of ten days. She has come to see the couple's first child, a daughter, Peg. Once there, she learns that Vera is an alcoholic given to countless affairs. Motherhood did not agree with Vera nor did it cause her to settle down. Nonetheless, a second daughter is born, Anna.

At the age of 16 Peg dies mysteriously, her body found in swamp water. This is a tragedy that seemingly Jack cannot endure, thus he returns to New York City and Gin. But now his painting, when he can work is dark and foreboding. Gone are the brilliant colors of the tropics, the light that had once been captured by his brush.

Much later Anna also comes to the City, asking questions about her sister's death, wanting to know more about her parents. Anna's appearance sparks a series of heartbreaking events.

Read "Port Mungo" for the pleasure of Patrick McGrath's flawless prose, to enjoy his evocative descriptive text. Read it to learn the secrets of another's heart.

- Gail Cooke

Patrick McGrath is a master of the gothic novel. One of the main characters in this novel is that of Vera who is an adultress and a drunkard as well. She is married to Jack, a virtuous artist. Port Mungo is a novel about child abuse, drunkeness, adultery, incest and drug addiction. As with any great gothic novel, Port Mungo revels in its sheer creepiness and may well be the best new gothic of the year.

Another Monstrously Twisted Tale of Sexual Longing, Artistry and British Ways, Gone Awry. A Review of Port Mongo by Patrick McGrath, CD audio read by Jennifer Van Dyck.

Patrick McGrath, son of a psychiatrist, master of the twisted, gnarliness of the human psyche, purveyor the consequences of the subtrafusion of desire brings us on further journeys into compulsion, he brings us to new latitudes.

The painter, Jack Rathbone, very young, very wild, artistic, wealthy meets the coarse, but brilliant older woman painter, Vera. The love tryst blossoms in England. Before they run off to New York to lead artists' lives. The heavy drinking, café/bar philosophizing and sexual habits of the untamed, wear their love thin. Jealousy rears its magnificent head.

They depart for cheaper, sunnier digs south. First they whisk off to Havana, circa 1957-1958. In the pre-Castro environment, they continue to crash and burn. An escape further south lands them in Port Mongo. More isolated from New York, Port Mongo becomes the birthplace of Jack's art, his two daughters and the full-fledged alcoholism of Vera. We make the acquaintance of the oldest daughter, Peg, post-mortem, through the tale's narrator, Gin Rathbone. Gin is the want-to-be artist, the loving sister and the observer. She remains very modern and British even after her transplant to New York. She possesses a very matronly kind of sexuality. She's wise in the ways of the world, and desiring but lacking artistic talent. This contributes to her complete devotion to her ar talented brother, Jack. She's always there for Jack.

She visited Jack in Port Mongo. She described the sun-washed Caribbean lifestyle. The sunny life provided a fantastic light in which Jack could paint. The dark, unfathomable turmoil in Vera, Vera's drinking and carousing with various men, and Jack's brooding jealousy juxtapose this. Following Peg's death, Jack abandons Vera, the other daughter is whisked off to another brother's family in England and Jack loses his talent. Time passes, parties are attended, sexual partners are met and left, and the daughter grows up, returns, and seeks out her family. She's a tall, thin, chain smoking 20 year old. She's a gorgeous version of Peg, her deceased sister, but with "very bad English teeth". She stirs upheaval into the pot of Jack and Gin's artistic, rich life, through her muted passions. Once she arrives the story gets even more interesting. This is where I don't want to give away more of the knotted, scummy plugged kitchen sink filth story.

I can say, the main thing I like about Patrick McGrath's writing is how captures the gnarled twisted debris as his characters toss it up from their unconscious, through their moods, their action. The psychological setting and the aftermath serve as a reminder that too much suppression will only rear up and bit you (and your love ones) in the ass.
I was disappointment with the ending, Mr. McGrath took a turn from his ability to write.... save him. The venture into territory better left unvisited resulted in a hackneyed story twist.

Unfortunately, this book didn't live up to his past novels of sexual journeys through the twisted knots that English people can get themselves into. Fortunately Jennifer Van Dyck is a great reader, and Gin's final reaction was enough of a break in timing that she almost salvaged the story.

If you are going to dive into Patrick McGrath's world of Port Mongo best not to go it alone, I highly recommend the CD version. Jennifer Van Dyck keeps this monster from sinking.