Trauma - Patrick McGrath

Almost without exception, Patrick McGrath’s novels are about intense, violent affairs, their inherent melodrama underplayed by the author’s beautiful, clear prose which takes a detached (sometimes unhinged) analytical view of the subject, usually from a medical or psychiatric perspective. Like Asylum, which this latest novel perhaps most resembles, (not least of which is in its admirably concise and self-explanatory title), Trauma throws a lot of complicating psychological and behavioural complications into the mix - sibling rivalry, damaged people, Oedipal and Electra complexes and more Freudian analysis than you can wave a big stick at. It’s lucidly insane, which is as concise a description of McGrath’s work as I can find.

Essentially then, there is no dramatic shift in subject matter or style for McGrath in Trauma, with a flawed or unreliable narrator (this one being a psychiatrist who obviously has a tendency to be over-analytical of other’s motives and behaviour), and clashes between rational analysis and sexual passions, between seemingly rational-minded individuals and artistic creative geniuses – so it’s not just Asylum that comes to mind here, but also Port Mungo.

What is different in Trauma, and confirmed in the author’s previous (fabulous) collection of three short novellas Ghost Town, is the growing influence and importance of living in New York that is playing a greater part in McGrath’s work, the author managing to channel both the passionate seething of life with the isolating factors and anonymity of living there. Slowly but surely then, the depictions of madness in McGrath books is extending from the individual to the collective madness of America, without losing any of the riveting personal drama of his work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten Present (Blood Crazy: Book 3) - Simon Clark

Image
In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia (Blood Crazy: Book 2) - Simon Clark

Image
At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...
Read more