Port Mungo - Hardcover

Patrick McGrath

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041651 ISBN 13: 9781400041657

Publisher: Knopf, 2004

Synopsis

Patrick McGrath is a writer of astonishing accomplishment: “fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore,” according to Tobias Wolff, with “the drive and suspense of the most shameless thriller [and] the inevitability of myth.”

Port Mungo, his sixth novel, is a harrowing story of art and love, and of a family cursed by both. Throughout a privileged, eccentric childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister, Gin. So at art school in London, she is pained to see him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a spectacularly bohemian painter with whom he soon runs off to New York City. From a bruised, bereft distance, Gin follows their southward progress through Miami and prerevolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps along the Gulf of Honduras. Here Jack discovers himself as an artist, and begins to work with a fervor as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera gradually succumbs, and which not even the births of two daughters can help to subdue.

Patrick McGrath’s mesmerizing narrative tracks these lives from the fifties in England to the nineties in Manhattan: the latter-day Gauguin; his buccaneering mate; the girls, Peg and Anna, left adrift in their wake; and Gin herself, their painstaking chronicler, whose house in Greenwich Village eventually becomes a haven for them all.

This feverish world of tropical impulses, artistic ambition, and love both reckless and enduring leads the Rathbones, ultimately, to a death swathed in mystery, and to another similarly bound in complicit secrecy, as the imperatives of passion, narcissism, and creativity hold each of them—and the reader—in relentless thrall.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow.

Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue.

Gin is the far-from-objective chronicler of these lives, across decades and continents. Over the years her Greenwich Village house becomes a haven for Jack, for his buccaneering mate, and for Peg and Anna, the two girls left to bob in their chaotic wake.

Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.

About the Author

Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400041651
• ISBN 13: 9781400041657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256