Port Mungo - Softcover

McGrath, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8845257126 ISBN 13: 9788845257124

Publisher: Bompiani, 2006

Synopsis

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.

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 this title

Review:

"Patrick McGrath can write a love story like no other man alive--dark, a little twisted, very passionate, and so loaded with exact and unexpected sensuous detail that, although you may never wish to actually live in this sleazy little city of Port Mungo, you could happily spend a whole vacation within its pages." Peter Carey 'Brilliant' John Banville 'His prose, sinuous, savoury and sly, is a delight.' Graham Swift 'Fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore.' Tobias Wolff

From the Author:

Where the story came from.

The story of Jack Rathbone and Vera Savage grew out of a longtime interest in the romantic figure of the brilliant but dissolute artist. I began with a painter, a man of excessive appetites who leaves a trail of destruction behind him wherever he goes. I soon realized he was little more than a walking cliche, however, so I turned him into a woman. Things at once became more interesting. Soon the question arose, what kind of a mother would such a woman make? This turned into the thematic core of the book. It took the form of a kind of intense dialogue between creativity, narcissism and responsibility.

I was interested at the same time in putting my characters in a tropical setting. I wanted to see the two painters against a Caribbean backdrop, both for the vividness and exoticism of it all, and also to allow them to self-destruct far from the constraints of the homeland and the city. For this purpose I invented Port Mungo, a seedy river town "wilting and steaming in the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras." Part of the novel concerns the eventful journey from London to Port Mungo. Part of it concerns what happens there. And part concerns the repercussions of those events, as they work themselves out much later in New York.

I took for my narrator a woman called Gin Rathbone, sister of Jack. This gave me the chance to create a further strand in the book, in that I was able to explore, even as the story rolled forward, the complicated geography of a close brother-sister relationship. In its way that relationship turned out every bit as steamy and mysterious as Port Mungo itself.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bompiani
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 8845257126
• ISBN 13: 9788845257124
• Binding: Paperback