"Port Mungo" pulled me in as soon as I started reading it, and it kept me until about halfway through, but it didn't succeed in doing what it set out to do. For one, the Honduran town of Port Mungo, the setting for only a short part of the book, was not as looming a character as I had expected it to be. It's almost like McGrath was trying to do a contemporary "Heart of Darkness" thing--white Europeans in the Third World (substitute Caribbean here for Conrad's Africa) give into their darker impulses and go stark, raving mad. It didn't work here because McGrath never successfully brings the setting of Port Mungo to life. In other words, he didn't successfully transport this reader. Besides, these characters are stark, raving mad to begin with, between their narcissism and their alcoholism, before they ever make it to Port Mungo, so I think all of the terrible things that happen in the book would have happpened regardless of whether they had stayed in Surrey, England or NYC. McGrath's writing is good (which is why I am giving this three stars, although I'm leaning more toward two and a half), but "Port Mungo" is no "Asylum," not by a long shot. McGrath's "Asylum" was a powerful book, one of my favorites, so if you want to read some of McGrath's work, that's the one I would recommend.
It's a book where, say, a woman might walk toward her lover for what looks like it will be a scene of tender reconciliation, and instead slashes his hand open with a hidden razor blade...after which the maid, of course, comes in quietly to wipe up the blood. That's Port Mungo in a nutshell. Random acts of decorum are followed by random acts of mayhem, over and over again, and all of it is told to us by a narrator who knows how to deploy anadiplosis and antistrophe and aporia to their most effective degree--one sentence after another of rhetorical perfection, a narrative voice that makes the weirdness of the story itself all the more unsettling. It's a hermetically sealed story, perfectly told, where any relationship to a separate reality from the story is completely beside the point. It didn't teach me anything. It didn't strive for greater meaning. It was just a great read--complete and hysterical fun, made all the more fun by its glorious prose.
Do You like book Port Mungo (2005)?
It's not a bad book, not by any means, though it's a little more meandering than some of Mr. McGrath's others. The problem, really, is this: I've read his other books (or some of them), and I've enjoyed them immensely, but this is sort of a lesser version of the others. Dr. Haggard's Disease and Asylum are startling and shocking and bewildering, and this just . . . isn't. It's kind of telegraphed from the beginning, and the narration is overly narrator-y, in a kind of twee way.If I hadn't read anything else of his, I think I'd actually rate this higher.
—emily
Patrick McGrath is probably one of the only people I feel remotely comfortable calling a "master storyteller." He can write a reasonably uneventful story, a tale of typical family troubles and psychological pathologies, and make it completely riveting. This is no exception. A story about a family of messed up artists told from the perspective of the husband's sister. It's told mostly in hearsay and conversations, and the various angles and irregularities between the individual stories only serve to make things more interesting. The best thing I can say about it is that it seems real.
—Rich Cresswell
Patrick McGrath is an author whose great facility with language always makes me feel in safe hands when I read him. His tales are dark, his characters are harrowed by experiences that have disfigured them internally, his narrators are unreliable. New Irish Gothic. The story of Jack Rathbone and his turbulent relations with lover and daughters is told by his adoring sister. Questions that arise through sister Gin's assumptions: 'How much latitude should be given someone who pursues elusive Art, how much should be excused? What makes one believe in someone else's declarations? To what degree does our belief in someone make us complicit in their bad actions if they are proven to have feet of clay?'
—Amy
