Martha Peake (Paperback)

Here the love coming to an end is between parent and child, in two senses: that of disfigured smuggler Harry Peake for his daughter Martha, and that of the parent country England for its ungrateful child, America.

With "Martha Peake" McGrath steps further back in time - and further away from London - than ever before. His previous books have revelled in the fog and vapours of early 20th century England. This time he takes us to America in the late 18th century, as rebellion is fomenting in the colonies.

The novel is told in retrospect, 50 years on, from the point of view of Ambrose Tree, nephew of Sir William Tree who was the assistant to the great anatomist Lord Drogo. Drogo had a special place in his heart for Harry Peake and his twisted spine, although Ambrose is not quite certain that his interests were altogether altruistic... Soon he comes to distrust his uncle's narrative altogether, and takes over the telling of the American tale himself. However, as he has nothing to go on but a few illegible scraps of letters sent home by Martha Peake, the reader soon realises that, as far as unreliable narrators go, well, it takes one to know one...

If the book has more plot and action, and a broader canvas than his earlier work - and on the surface appears altogether more ambitious - it suffers too. It is a less subtle, delicate work than we are used to from McGrath, and the writing remains at its most lively when we are in London. There is less to chew on psychologically than in "Asylum", so though it is a work worth reading - he's incapable, after all, of writing a bad sentence - it should not be considered representative. Read it, but read them all.

This new attention comes at a bad point in Harry's life, as his penance has come to a natural end. The succour of drink seems to resume its old attraction for him. And now a patron with money arrives on the scene. Drogo's attentions demean Harry. Drogo shows him off as a medical spectacle to other doctors, something which hurts as much as the Schoolteacher's measuring of bodies in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'. Badly distilled gin fumes Harry's descent into Hell. Even Martha is forced to flee to Drogo Hall. But just as Harry cannot reject his need for drink, so are his other desires inflamed...

The novel is mainly narrated by Ambrose Tree, William Tree's nephew, who is set to inherit Drogo Hall. This narrative is very much tainted by a fertile Romantic imagination: the sublime and the picturesque are very much in evidence here in this story of colonial Gothic. You can't help but think that Ambrose has read maybe a little too much Otranto, too much Mrs. Radcliff, and also that he's a little before his time (Ambrose seems to be writing Bronte-style twenty years before that melancholy brood got published). He's just as wimpish and feeble as the lonely traveller who stumbles across Wuthering Heights, even if he is named after the vicious protagonist of Matthew Lewis' 'The Monk'. And as unreliable narrators go, well, I certainly wouldn't trust Ambrose with my prized possessions. However, there is not just the one unreliable narrator in this novel, but three, since William Tree also narrates the story, and Silas Rind, Martha Peake's protector in America, also plays a huge role in her tale. There are some letters from Martha Peake, but they are old and decaying fifty years after they are written, and not even a sentence of her comes to us direct.

Patrick McGrath, in his bid to write a Gothic novel, has studied the classics of old and all the theory that surrounds them. Hence Harry wondering around like Mary Shelley's Monster with a map of America transcribed across his back in a none too subtle way. I thought all the cartoons of this era featuring similar monstrous proletariats were to due with fears of an English revolution made on the French model, not the American one. Still, the later Gothic novels, like 'Dracula', did feature colonialism (with Englishmen threatened with invasion from the east only to be saved by a fertile American). Why not go the whole hog, McGrath seems to reason, and throw the American colonies into the mixture and see what happens? The Gothic form is supreme in America now, what with their Muldurs and Buffys staking everything in sight. In this way, there seems to be too much rationale behind this novel of Unreason.

Where McGrath is at his strongest though, is in the depiction of the brutality of the redcoats. He really does succeed in enabling us to smell the smoke and be repelled by the heat of the fire. Some American patriots, however, would have good reason to question the tone of Martha's role in the Revolution. Having said that, in my research, I did come across one website which suggested that Molly Pitcher may not have fired that cannon. On the whole, however, I am much of the tendency to believe that such stories are true. Certainly Ambrose Tree is a far more paranoid listener than I. It could be that McGrath is pouring doubt on the oral tradition so beloved of Harry Peake, and if so, that would be a great shame, especially in the light of Alistair MacLeod's recent brilliant novel 'No Great Mischief'. However, the employment of unreliable narrators has been very much a Gothic tradition, from Rider Haggard's 'She' to that wondrous narrator in Hogg's 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner'. And although Ambrose disavows all knowledge of Harry Rind Peake, you can't help but wonder whether this novel should be named after him, rather than Martha, and that there is something that his uncle has neglected to tell him.

But if we're talking about the denial of psychological and narrative closure here, and of a modern day novelist attempting to write in the Gothic form, then I must confess that I much prefer Joanne Harris' approach in 'Sleep, Pale Sister' (author of recent hit 'Chocolat'). Patrick McGrath's novel seems as botched as Harry's back in comparison. The trouble with having Martha's and Harry's story narrated for them is that you never really get to see the world through their eyes, and as such, they are so far distant from the reader that they may as well be in the New World.