It is difficult to know what to think of this
novel. It purports to be a novel of the Revolution, which to my mind
suggests the French Revolution, but in fact covers the Revolutionary war of
America. Within its sometimes setting of the dark and dank Drogo Hall,
the novel also makes bold strides into the Gothic realm. But at the end,
this meeting of the Gothic and the Revolutionary seems too contrived.
Although the novel is named after his daughter,
the crippled figure of Harry Peake also shares the limelight of this
narrative. Indeed, part of the novel concerns his life as a kind of
sideshow freak, reduced to bearing his huge misshapen spine in public taverns
for penitence and charity. Harry has much to be sorry for: when he
was a Cornish smuggler, he caused the death of his wife, and Martha's mother,
by fire, his back broken in an attempt to rescue her. He's awoken from a
drunken slumber by oily smoke emanating from fleeces of wool, a metaphor for
the smuggling trade and England's wealth. With the death of his wife, his
children go to stay with his wife's sister, all except Martha, who clings to
her father. Together, father and daughter head off into London, there to
seek a living and penance in the filthy metropolis. Years pass, and Martha
comes to maturity. Harry gains fame as the 'Cripplegate Monster', and
excels in his vocation as bard and performer of oral ballads about an American
patriot. Unfortunately, one of the bills advertising Harry's performances
falls into the hands of Lord Drogo and his assistant, William Tree. Drogo
is one of the country's leading anatomists, and his professional curiosity is
aroused by Harry's misshapen back.
This new attention comes at a bad point in Harry's
life, as his penance has come to a natural end. The succor 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
School teacher's measuring of bodies in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'. Badly
distilled gin fumes Harry's descent to 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...
Harry Peake staggers around Lambeth Marsh, like a
veritable Heathcliffe or Frankenstein-made Monster. The novel is mainly
narrated by Ambrose Tree, William Tree's nephew, who is set to inherit Drogo
Hall. This novel is very much tainted by a fertile Romantic imagination:
the sublime and the picturesque are very much in evidence here in this story of
imperial, colonial Gothic. You can't help but think that Ambrose has read
maybe a little too much Otranto, too much Mrs. Radcliffe, 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. 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.
The story of Harry and Martha Peake is
fascinating, but the timbers seem to reveal too much about the construction of
this tale. Patrick McGrath, in his bid to write a Gothic novel, has
studied the classics of old and all the theory which 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 reasons, and throw
the American colonies into the mixture and see what happens? The Gothic
form seems supreme in America now, what with their Muldurs and Buffys staking
everything in sight. There seems to be too much rationale behind
this novel of Unreason, and perhaps McGrath is a little too Tory in his
approach.
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 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 does suggest 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 brilliant '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 which 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.
AuthorTrek Rating:7/10
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