To The Last Page

If you’ve read any of Patrick McGrath’s work before you’ll be aware and expect his book to deal with madness, but madness takes many forms. While in books with evocative titles like Asylum , Trauma and Dr. Haggard’s Disease  it is often related to acts of madness in fictional doctors and damaged artists in Gothic asylums, McGrath has extended its range to take in wider dysfunction in American society, as well as the trauma inflicted by historical events, from 9/11 in Ghost Town to the American Revolution years of Martha Peake . What greater collective social madness can there be then than a country involved in a civil war? Last Days in Cleaver Square has quite a few of McGrath’s familiar elements, not least of which is a narrator who appears to be gradually losing his mind, which can only be a good thing for fans of his deliciously delirious fiction, and it is indeed again an artist who is afflicted with the onset of madness here. Francis McNulty is an aging poet who in his yout...

Patrick McGrath is a masterful and elegant writer of suspenseful situations that delicately unravel unhinged characters on a downward spiral into madness. The writing is beautifully crafted, full of barely perceptible insinuation, erotic undercurrents and anticipatory tension. At his best, there’s a tendency towards the gothic in the incipient madness spilling over into delicately wrought melodrama in such works as Asylum , Spider and Dr Haggard’s Disease , but there has been a repetitiveness that has seen diminishing returns more lately in Trauma and Constance , albeit still with elegantly and beautifully crafted writing to enjoy. If that character is always present in his works, McGrath has worked a little outside his comfort zone in the US historical drama Martha Peake , in the exoticism of Port Mungo and – perhaps most successfully – in Ghost Town , his collection of three stories in different time period in a Manhattan setting. The Wardrobe Mistress extends McGrath’s range and...

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 be...