Port Mungo [Paperback]

Patrick Mcgrath (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2005

Throughout their privileged but highly eccentric childhood Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, Jack plunges into a passionate affair with Vera Savage, a painter some years his senior, and they soon run away to New York. From a bruised and bereft distance Gin follows their southward progress to Miami, then Havana, and so to Port Mungo, a wilting swamp town on the steamy Gulf of Honduras. There Jack devotes himself to his art, and works with a fervour as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera succumbs, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue. As the tension builds, a tragedy occurs that will tear apart not only their world but that of Jack's watchful sister, Gin.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The psychologically suspenseful story of Jack Rathbone, a "latter-day Gauguin" who flees his native England to pursue a career as a painter as well as a volatile relationship with artist Vera Savage, is narrated by his sister, Gin, whose obvious devotion skews her perspective. McGrath's sixth novel unfolds in a series of flashbacks, from Jack's childhood in England to Greenwich Village in the 1950s and, eventually, to the Honduran town of Port Mungo, where Jack develops a style he calls "tropicalism" or, more sinisterly, "malarial." The birth of daughter Peg threatens the marriage, and her mysterious death, at 16, dooms it; Jack moves in with his sister in New York. Ostensibly, the search for the truth behind Peg's death propels the narrative, but the mix of flashbacks and present action is confusing, and Gin's role feels trumped up. The book becomes even more baroque when Jack's second daughter, raised in England, moves to New York and agrees to let her father paint her, in the nude. It's a provocative conceit, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Despite McGrath's intelligent, lyrical prose, the story lacks the urgency of his earlier work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From 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.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks (May 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747574154
• ISBN-13: 978-0747574156
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There Are No Mysteries, Only Secrets, May 19, 2010

By 

Karen Holtz "NJ Book Girl" (Woodside, New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Port Mungo (Paperback)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Art with a Darker Palette, October 18, 2004

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Port Mungo (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A sensitive portrait of a tortured artist, July 18, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Port Mungo (Hardcover)

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.