Port Mungo

by PatrickMcGrath (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.40

  Throughout their privileged but highly eccentric childhood Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, Jack plunges into a passionate affair with Vera Savage, a painter some years his senior, and they soon run away to New York. From a bruised and bereft distance Gin follows their southward progress to Miami, then Havana, and so to Port Mungo, a wilting swamp town on the steamy Gulf of Honduras. There Jack devotes himself to his art, and works with a fervour as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera succumbs, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue. As the tension builds, a tragedy occurs that will tear apart not only their world but that of Jack's watchful sister, Gin.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $4.32

  From their childhood, Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, it is a painful wrench for Gin to watch Jack fall under the spell of Vera Savage, an older, flamboyant artist. Jack and Vera run off to New York within weeks and, from a bruised and bereft distance, sister Gin follows the couple's progress to Port Mungo, a river town in the swamps of the Gulf of Honduras. There, Jack devotes himself to his art, while Vera succumbs to infidelity and a chronic restlessness, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue. In his spellbinding narrative, Patrick McGrath tracks these individuals across decades and continents: the latter-day Gauguin figure Jack, his buccaneering mate Vera and their two girls, Peg and Anna, cast adrift in their parents' chaos - as observed by Gin, their far from detached chronicler. It is ultimately a world of dark tropical impulses and Manhattan art market forces, where a mysterious death is swathed in tight complicit secrecy, and the imperatives of narcissism and art hold human beings in outlandish thrall.