Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution (Vintage Contemporaries)

A hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay. Master storyteller Patrick McGrath--author of the critically acclaimed novel Asylum and a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction--once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Peake envelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to a flame-haired heroine who will live in the imagination long after the last page is turned. Settled with our narrator beside a crackling fire, we hear of the poet and smuggler Harry Peake--how Harry lost his wife, Grace, in a tragic fire that left him horribly disfigured; how he made a living displaying his deformed spine in the alehouses of eighteenth-century London; and how his only solace was his devoted daughter, Martha, who inherited all of his fire but none of his passion for cheap gin. As the drink eats away at Harry's soul, it opens ancient wounds; when he commits one final act of unspeakable brutality, Martha, fearing for her life, must flee for the American colonies. Once safely on America's shores, Martha immerses herself in the passions of smoldering rebellion. But even in this land of new beginnings, she is unable to escape the past. Caught up in a web of betrayals, she redeems herself with one final, unforgettable act of courage. Superbly plotted and wholly absorbing, Martha Peake is an edge-of-your-seat shocker that is crafted with the psychological precision Patrick McGrath's fans have come to expect. A writer whose novels The New York Times Book Review has called both "mesmerizing" and "brilliant," McGrath applies his remarkable imaginative powers to a fresh and broad historical canvas. Martha Peake is the poignant, often disturbing tale of a child fighting free of a father's twisted love, and of the colonists' struggle to free themselves from a smothering homeland. It is Patrick McGrath's finest novel yet.

When Ambrose Tree is summoned by his ancient uncle to the brooding mansion Drogo Hall, he suspects it’s to hear the old man’s dying words and then collect a sizable inheritance. He has no idea he is about to learn the bizarre story of Harry Peake, Cornish smuggler turned poet who became a monster capable of the most horrifying acts. Or that he’s about to become psychologically enmeshed in the riveting life of Harry’s daughter, Martha, who flees her father for colonial America where she becomes a heroic figure in the revolution against England. Or that he himself has a crucial role to play in this mesmerizing tale as it rushes headlong and hauntingly toward its powerful climax. Martha Peake is a spellbinding alloy of Gothic mystery and historical romance.

Publishers Weekly

Known as a spinner of elegant neo-gothic thrillers--the sort full of psychological tension but narrow in scope--McGrath tackles a much broader canvas in his sweeping new novel about the American Revolution. At the heart of McGrath's tale are a father--Harry Peake, an energetic Cornwall man broken by calamity--and his daughter and helpmate, Martha. Like many of his countrymen, Harry smuggles to avoid the excise, but after a nearly bungled job, his spine is broken and he is transformed into a misshapen monster. He sets off for London with eight-year-old Martha, earning money at first by exhibiting his deformed spine and later by performing his own Ballad of Joseph Tresilian, an allegory about the king's tyranny over the colonists. Although Harry's reputation grows--enough to attract the attention of Lord Drogo, an anatomist interested in collecting rare bones--he succumbs to drink and far worse, endangering now teenaged Martha and forcing her to flee to her cousins in America. But it is 1774, and those cousins, living in a fishing community north of Boston, are committed patriots. Martha throws her lot in with the Americans, but her loyalty to her father threatens her and the other colonists and, finally, determines her destiny. All this is narrated half a century later by Ambrose Tree, nephew of Lord Drogo's assistant, Dr. William Tree. Like many of McGrath's earlier narrators, Ambrose is unreliable; he recounts, and embellishes, the tales his uncle William tells at night in drafty Drogo Hall. As Ambrose's questionable assumptions are proved true or false, what is betrayed is not the oh-so-familiar black heart of the narrator but the sweet heroism of the protagonists. McGrath (Asylum) takes a big risk, but the result is an invigorating take on the Revolution, just the tonic for even the most jaded reader during this election season. Agent, Amanda Urban at ICM. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Charlie Weir grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a supremely dysfunctional family: his father absenting himself, his mother battling depressive illness, his brother fighting him for whatever comfort remained. So no wonder he studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, eventually establishing a practice back in New York just as the first brutalized veterans of Vietnam started returning home with a world of hurt. Agnes, the sister of one of these men, soon became his wife, though her brother's death ended their marriage just as surely, stranding their daughter in between them and leaving Charlie to endure alone as his city fell further into a stupor of violence and mayhem. Then, years later, things begin to happen. His mother's death brings Agnes back into his life at last, and Walt, his brother, introduces him to a woman who first enlivens and then endangers everything Charlie hoped might restore his dwindling faith in himself, his calling, and his future.

This novel is like watching a ghastly accident in slow motion, with an expert voice over made by one of its participants. "Physician, heal thyself" is an expression that comes increasingly to mind as events spiral madly out of control and this story races, heedlessly and heart-strong, toward its shocking conclusion. It encapsulates the themes -- family, passion, madness -- that by now have become synonymous with Patrick McGrath.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair—assuming, of course, there is any difference. The contemporary novel of terror typically focuses on the breakdown of personality, the return of the repressed, the untimely mixing of memory and desire. Happily for us wimps, McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier…Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages.

Patrick McGrath is a writer of astonishing accomplishment: “fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore,” according to Tobias Wolff, with “the drive and suspense of the most shameless thriller [and] the inevitability of myth.”

Port Mungo, his sixth novel, is a harrowing story of art and love, and of a family cursed by both. Throughout a privileged, eccentric childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister, Gin. So at art school in London, she is pained to see him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a spectacularly bohemian painter with whom he soon runs off to New York City. From a bruised, bereft distance, Gin follows their southward progress through Miami and prerevolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps along the Gulf of Honduras. Here Jack discovers himself as an artist, and begins to work with a fervor as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera gradually succumbs, and which not even the births of two daughters can help to subdue.

Patrick McGrath’s mesmerizing narrative tracks these lives from the fifties in England to the nineties in Manhattan: the latter-day Gauguin; his buccaneering mate; the girls, Peg and Anna, left adrift in their wake; and Gin herself, their painstaking chronicler, whose house in Greenwich Village eventually becomes a haven for them all.

This feverish world of tropical impulses, artistic ambition, and love both reckless and enduring leads the Rathbones, ultimately, to a death swathed in mystery, and to another similarly bound in complicit secrecy, as the imperatives of passion, narcissism, and creativity hold each of them—and the reader—in relentless thrall.

From the Hardcover edition.

in Two Novels And One Short Story Collection, Patrick Mcgrath Has Established Himself As The Foremost Master Of The New Gothic. He Has Been Compared By the New York Times To Poe, Wilde, Kafka, And Robert Louis Stevenson And Hailed As An Ingenious Manipulator Of Discomfort And Suspense. In dr. Haggard's Disease, He Writes His Most Powerful And Universal Story To Date -- A Tale Of Love Both Beautiful And Bizarre. Dr. Edward Haggard Is A Tragic Figure On A Tiny Scale. A Lonely, Pain-racked Romantic, He Stands At The Window Of His House On The Edge Of A Cliff, Watching As The Clouds Of War Draw Near, And Reflecting On The Nature Of Love, Death, Medicine, War -- But Most Of All On The Wife Of The Senior Pathologist, And The Few Brief Months Of Bliss They Shared. Shortly After The Outbreak Of World War Ii, A Fighter Pilot Appears In Dr. Haggard's Surgery, Reawakening Memories Of The Single Grand Passion Of Haggard's Life. For This Young Man Is The Son Of The Woman Haggard Loved, And As The Doctor Becomes More And More Intrigued By The Bizarre Changes Occurring In His New Patient's Body, His Old Passion Gives Way To A Fresh One, A Passion Altogether Odder, And Darker, Than The First. With The Consummate Artistry And Profound Understanding Of The Frontiers Of Human Experience That He Displayed In His Previous Work, Patrick Mcgrath Brings To His Narration Of A Doomed Love Affair And In Bizarre Aftermath An Acute Erotic Intensity Portraying A Man Whose Disease Is Passion -- Disease That Can Exalt A Man, But Can Also Destroy Him.

publishers Weekly

an Aging Doctor Retires To A Gothic Manor To Indulge In Morphine And Mournful Reveries About A Failed Love Affair.

Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it.Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love.Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.

This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

Publishers Weekly

Witty, weird and highly enjoyable, this gothic British tale is aptly titled. The set-up is macabre: a distinguished paleontologist is brain-damaged and slowly turning into a vegetable. He cannot speak, but narrates an interior monologue of all he sees and hears: a lot of sexual shenanigans and a particularly grisly murder, all centered around "Fledge,'' the butler, who has ambitions. The stylistic joke is that all these horrors take place in a quaint, genteel English country setting, where the village is "Pock-on-the-Fling,'' the pub, "The Hodge and Purlet'' and the barrister, "Sir Fleckley Tome.'' However deadly the deed, the language is always decorous and impeccably mannered. The result is strangely hilarious -- as if a Stephen King story were being told in the manner of a latter-day Anthony Trollope.

Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Then into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden merely to rebuild an old, Victorian conservatory, but there's an overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man that Stella is powerless to ignore. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes, Stella makes her decision - one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. In a seedy river town on the Gulf of Honduras, Jack Rathbone believed he had found a place that would give him and his lover, the accomplished artist Vera Savage, the solitude they would need to create a body of work that would shake the art world to its core. But in a place where time lies thicker than the mangrove swamps that surround it, Jack and Vera discover an emotional frontier more fearsome, untamed, and dangerous than any wilderness. Told through the voice of Jack's adoring sister, Gin, Port Mungo is the riveting story of this ill-fated couple, one that begins as a bohemian flight-of-fancy before unraveling into a dark, debauched and sinister tale. With Port Mungo , the incomparable Patrick McGrath, author of the acclaimed novels Spider and Asylum , delivers a spellbinding narrative to explore the obsessive pursuit of art and love.

from Our Most Celebrated Writer Of The Psychological Thriller Comes This Nerve-wracking Yet Eerily Beautiful Work Of Erotic Obsession And Madness.

in The Summer Of 1959 Stella Raphael Joins Her Psychiatrist Husband, Max, At His New Posting—a Maximum-security Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Beautiful And Headstrong, Stella Soon Falls Under The Spell Of Edgar Stark, A Brilliant And Magnetic Sculptor Who Has Been Confined To The Hospital For Murdering His Wife In A Psychotic Rage.

but Stella's Knowledge Of Edgar's Crime Is No Hindrance To The Volcanic Attraction That Ensues—a Passion That Will Consume Stella's Sanity And Destroy Her And The Lives Of Those Around Her.

new Yorker

superb.... asylum Is Mcgrath's Most Somber And Most Realistic Book, And Also His Best.

From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her A woman whose husband is a doctor working in an asylum has an affair with a patient, a sculptor who killed his wife from jealousy. When he escapes she follows him, but his jealous fits send her back to her husband. The sculptor is caught, the doctor changes jobs, but that is not the end of the story. One day she will rejoin the sculptor, this time as a fellow-patient Paralysed, mute and confined to a wheelchair, former palaeontologist Sir Hugo Coal recounts the events that led to his 'cerebral accident', as well as his suspicions of his butler Fledge, who he suspects is plotting to replace him as Lord of Crook Manor. Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion Fleeing the brutality of her father, poet and smuggler Harry Peake, Martha Peake sets sail for America, where she becomes caught up in the colonies' struggle for independence from Britain Patrick Mcgrath. Originally Published: Poseidon Press, 1990.