Fiction: A sister grieves for her lost relationship with her adored brother. Having spent a traditional English childhood with brother Jack, Gin Rathbone then sets off for art school with him.
All is wonderful until suddenly Jack falls under the spell of Vera Savage, an older woman. She is an established artist who arrives at the art school, St Martin's in London, to lecture the students about modern art - and she steals Jack. Or so it seems:
Jack liked the look of her at once, this was clear, and for this reason: she dressed like a prostitute. She stood there at the podium, a loud, bosomy woman in a tight dress and pancake makeup, one hand cocked akimbo on her hip and the other flapping the air as she spoke to us with a kind of hoarse nervous bravado, and I remember thinking her opinionated and not very clean, nor entirely sober.
From the opening pages, McGrath ensures the reader is well aware that in sister Gin we have a narrator of bias and in Vera a caricatured anti-heroine.
So intent is Gin on telling us the story of her brother's messy life with Vera, the hard-drinking, unfaithful, uncaring mother of his two neglected daughters, that it is obvious Jack is unlikely to emerge as a saint. By any standards this is a thin, unoriginal book. Here we have the story of two painters, both odd individuals. Jack is obsessive about his art; Vera seems obsessed with everything, though everything, for her, amounts to sex and drink - she appears to have given up on art. She certainly gave up on Jack a long time ago.
Jack is a loser, Vera is a mess. He is presented as a wronged visionary and she as a bad mother - but the real tragedy is Gin, who appears to have done nothing in her life except lament Jack, who is clearly not the man she thinks he is. Early in the narrative it is made clear that Jack's daughter, Peg, is dead. No one knows what happened and unfortunately, more for McGrath than Peg, it doesn't matter. Port Mungo is a half-hearted attempt at telling a story that relies on secrets being told. The problem is that the secrets aren't that secret or even that interesting. In Gin, McGrath has failed to create a credible narrator: she is instead a voyeur, only thinly developed, fascinated by her brother's slow decline and only marginally interested in anything else.
Two artists, a crazed romance that rapidly degenerates into a disastrous marriage, and, of course, most of it takes place in a squalid village in the tropics. Against the backdrop of these personal tensions two children compete for attention; one dies, the other looks likely to survive, rescued as she is by convention in the form of Jack and Gin's unpopular brother, Gerald, a man with a sense of right and wrong.
No this is not supposed to be a rewrite of the life of Gauguin. Nor is it really meant as a reworking of a Somerset Maugham story. But it is a sloppy and conventional book from a good writer. Patrick McGrath's sixth novel is his poorest, and it is a shame. When his first collection of stories, Blood and Water and Other Tales, was published by Penguin in the mid-1980s, he looked an original talent. His first novel, The Grotesque (1989), was not only wonderful, it also revitalised the gothic genre with flair and black humour and remains his sharpest, most inventive performance to date.
Spider (1991) and Dr Haggard's Disease (1993) soon followed, again displaying McGrath's fluid formal prose, his weirdly anarchic humour and feel for narratives of psychological intensity. Madness, it seemed, was his natural demesne, a madness that was fluent, highly articulate, intelligent, obsessive and obsessed. His fiction was atmospheric and convincing.
Yet conviction was not one of the strongest features of Martha Peake (2000). It is a period novel constructed upon much detail as well as an enduring father- daughter relationship. There is a softness about the work which makes it appealing and likeable, if less compelling than his earlier books. Certain doubts hung over it and it remains a good, at times atmospheric novel rather than a great one. It seemed to suggest that McGrath's artistic dilemma was in living up to his initial promise - The Grotesque, Spider and, in some ways, Asylum are superb. They work because McGrath writes very well and is also a considerable and daring storyteller. His genius is best expressed in explorations of the darker areas of the human psyche, particularly the nature of obsession. They succeed because they are terrifying as well as human, sympathetic, politely passionate and, ultimately, sad. Therein lies his strength, the ability to balance wild humour with subtle glimpses of utter despair.
In Port Mungo, the arrival after 20 years of the younger daughter, Anna, signals that the narrative is scuppered. Were any film-maker to decide to attempt a film version using McGrath's stilted dialogue as written here, the result would be embarrassing melodrama rendered lopsided by long sequences of unfunny ridiculousness.
Seldom in serious literary fiction has such an unconvincing narrative voice been recruited to spin out as crude and predictable a yarn as this one with its cast of caricatured misfits.
The failure of Port Mungo, a crude forgettable nonentity of a novel, doesn't matter; but the failure of as gifted a writer as Patrick McGrath, usually so polished and one of the most original of contemporary British storytellers, is lamentable and surprising.