Port Mungo

by Patrick McGrath

Book Overview

From their childhood, Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, it is a painful wrench for Gin to watch Jack fall under the spell of Vera... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400041651
• ISBN13: 9781400041657
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A spellbinding narrative

In his novel, Mr McGrath tells the story of painter Jack Rathbone, a figure similar to the latter-day Paul Gauguin. The narrative is performed in an emotional manner by his sister Gin. Jack's life as an artist starts in London where he attends St Martin's School of Art with his sister. But one day, at the age of seventeen, Jack falls under the spell of Vera Savage, a thirty year old artist from Glasgow. He is immediately attracted by her petulant manner, her flamboyant character although it quickly appears that this woman is neither very clean nor often sober. Gin deeply resents this "painted creature" but she can do nothing to prevent his brother from following Vera to New York. There, Jack is profoundly unhappy, sensing that Vera belongs to a world which offers no place for him, which even rejects him and Jack finds himself tramping the streets with a feeling of anger and misery. Finally Jack and Vera decide to take a passage to Cuba but due to some political unrest, they are forced to leave the island and end up in Port Mungo in Honduras. There, in spite of being engaged in a torrid and complicated love affair with his wife, Jack can finally devote himself entirely to his painting. Their two daughters Peg and Ann are brought up in their parents' chaos. It is mainly Jack who raises them because Vera succumbs to infidelity and alcoholism and her chronic restlessness makes her an impossible mother. After their return to New York 20 years later, the sequels of the time they spent in Port Mungo are still there, notably Peg's death which is surrounded by a halo of mysterious circumstances. In Mr McGrath's novel, human beings are held in a thrall by love, hatred, secrecy, art and complicity and despite their efforts they are unable to escape their fate.

There Are No Mysteries, Only Secrets

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.

A sensitive portrait of a tortured artist

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 ''t

A Creepy Gothic

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.

ONE ARTIST CREATES ANOTHER

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