Product Description

A man is haunted by the memory of his mother with a rope round her neck. It is the American War of Independence, and having defied the British forces occupying New York she must pay for her revolutionary activities. But fifty years on, her son harbours a festering guilt for his inadvertent part in her downfall. In thrusting nineteenth-century New York, a ruthless merchant's sensitive son is denied the love of his life through his father's prejudice against the immigrants flooding into the city - and madness and violence ensue. In the wake of 9/11, a Manhattan psychiatrist treats a favoured patient reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Center, but fails to detect the damage she herself has sustained. In this trio of stunning tales from a master storyteller, Patrick McGrath excavates the layers of New York's turbulent history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297048 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'As sharp and haunting as a daguerreotype McGrath's prose is clean, lucid and utterly transfixing' Sunday Times 'The best of McGrath's menace is vividly present McGrath remains one of the most interesting, and possibly the most consistently original of his generation of British writers' Irish Times 'Like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe, McGrath probes the insanity and violence lurking beneath the skin of daily life' Financial Times 'There ought to be a word for that style of literary composition that is both charming and dark; McGrath has mastered it, and his collection brings out the same qualities in New York' Daily Telegraph

Irish Times
‘The private hells festering in our diseased minds inspire this invariably original English writer’s singular fictions’

Telegraph
‘The narrative cleverly winds around themes of suffocation, manipulation and deceit’

Customer Reviews

Three tales of Manhattan then and now
The first story called The Year of the Gibbet takes the reader back to 1776 when King George's ships came to conquer Manhattan. It is the sad tale of a boy of ten whose mother becomes a traitor with the British in order to sustain her children.
The second story is that of Julius in the 1850s who falls in love with a girl below his rank, a fact which will lead his father to take an unpardonable measure. Love denied can make us mad indeed.
In the third story Danny Silver is the narrator's patient whose psychological problem originated in a suffocating maternal relationship. He observed the suffering of a woman he hired for sex, Kim Lee, was affected by it and launched himself in a reckless trajectory with her. The 9/11 terror attacks were so destructive on Danny's psyche that not only did he buy sex but bought a sort of emotional intimacy with a woman who was even more damaged than himself and mistook the comfort it gave him for love.
A stunning trio of tales, they are sly and thought-provoking because the author evokes the insanity and violence underlying the surface of everyday life.

Tales of New York
Patrick McGrath's 2005 trilogy Ghost Town consists of three novellas all set in New York, with characters of each sometimes inhabiting almost identical areas of Manhattan. Chronologically, though, they move in sequence. All three are involved to some extent or other with violence and its devastating aftereffects.

The first story is set half a century or so after the American War of Independence, and is narrated by a man huddling on his own while facing imminent death, reflecting back on his brave mother's death during that war. This is Martha Peake territory, and the violence and upheaval caused by the British refusal to relinquish power peacefully to the Americans is conjured up evocatively. The story is solid, full of rich detail and vivid imagery, but the character of the narrator's mother is too much that of the stereotypical staunch, valiant, unfalteringly courageous woman to truly come alive for me - surely a real person would have wept under the circumstances of her death, watched by her young children. Unflinching valour in the face of violent death, especially for a mother watched by her offspring, is just too much the stuff of legend to bring a characters to life.

The second story is much more plausible. Set in the mid nineteeth century, it coincides temporally with the Civil War, but the war between the North and South occurs offstage. The story is concerned more with the catastrophe of a chain of events in a single family. The wealthy Noah van Horn, steely and focused after the premature death of his young wife, sets emotion aside in concentrating on the growth of his business empire. When his son Julius - already a disappointment in his inability to take over the family business - falls in love with an unsuitable woman, Noah takes drastic action. The results are explosive and disastrous. The characters in this story are more finely painted than in the first - Noah is plausible as a driven man whose prejudice and emphasis on respectability bring his family to ruin.

The third story is as powerful as the second. Set in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers, it involves an unreliable narrator, a trick McGrath pulled off with chilling aplomb in Port Mungo. A psychiatrist tries to help a confused and damaged man cast off his ghosts and forge healthy relationships. Or does she? Whose interest is the psychiatrist serving, and what are her motives?

All in all, this is a stunning trio of tales which gives a hint of the wealth of human emotion and destruction that has taken place in one of the world's most famous cities. ****0 1/2