Tag: Obsession

Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath

Readers will be drawn into this novel through the characters and the pace of the writing. Writers will want to discover how McGrath creates the illusion that is the surface story and how he reveals the undercurrent, the shadowed story running beneath the surface, the foreshadowing that is easy to miss.

Do you ever pick up a book just because of its cover? This is how I came to read Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath. Art is one of my passions and the white cover is brushed with colour: orange, yellow, mustard, a blotch of red, another of green, a trail of purple. As it turns out, the story wasn’t what I expected, but I quickly became engrossed and resented sleep interfering with reading time.

The protagonist, Jack Rathbone, is a charming lad, narcissist, and more. His sister, Gin, narrates the novel; she adores him, gives up her painting dreams, and supports him. Vera Savage is the older woman and accomplished artist whom the still-teenage Jack enchants, marries, and runs away with (from London to New York’s art scene, and then to isolated and tropical Port Mungo). McGrath vividly draws each character and slowly reveals the tangled web created through Jack’s ambition, Gin’s illusions, and Vera’s weaknesses. Early in the novel, there’s a hint of Jack’s narcissism and Gin’s lack of insight:

He told me he would never have worked with such, oh—grandiosity—had he not lived in Port Mungo. He found there a reflection of himself, he said, and the meaning of his life as an artist was the effort to translate that identification directly onto canvas. I thought of his repeated motifs, his rain forests and rivers, his serpents and birds, and in particular his gleaming mythic bodies staring into pools—and much as I came to admire the work I never properly understood how he saw himself in those paintings.

Jack and Vera’s fraught relationship does produce (besides art) two daughters. The elder, born in Port Mungo grows wild, a shocking child in Gin’s mind. She invites Jack and Peg to visit her in New York where she has moved. The first visit goes well, but the later second reveals tension between father and adolescent.

Port Mungo is not a story for everyone. It begins with innocence and ambition, but the lives of the characters veer into murky waters. I found it distressing and upon completion decided not to write a review. Then I changed my mind because McGrath has written a compelling story that drew me in and kept me reading. And the fact that a story stays alive after the reading of it…well, isn’t that the kind of story we would each like to write.

For another story of a sister’s love and compassion for her brother, read The Gathering by Anne Enright: The Gathering. And for one about obsession, see Obsession by A. S. Byatt: Obsession.

50 Port Mungo

Available through your local bookstore or online: Port Mungo

Book Review: The Island of Lost Maps: a true story of cartographic Crime (by Miles Harvey)

Miles Harvey takes us on a journey where maps and travel, character and obsession, and crime come together and where the “strange borderland between inner life and outer experience, dreams and memory, body and soul” is explored. Map aficionados are bound to love The Island of Maps. Readers who are also writers will want to explore how Harvey reveals the shadowy Gilbert Bland and how it leads Harvey to character insights of himself.

Miles Harvey—who tired of reading other people’s escapades in his role as book-reviewer and columnist for Outside magazine—began to crave an adventure of his own:

Or maybe adventure isn’t quite the word. It was not that I had any particular desire to do something death-defying; what I wanted was a quest, a goal, a riddle to solve, a destination.

Harvey found his quest in crime, in his search to understand Gilbert Bland’s map thefts and, as it turns out, obsession. Along the way, we discover the fascinating world of old maps and cartographic traders. And we discover something of the character of both Bland and Harvey. We also discover the magic that is old maps.

Throughout the centuries people have viewed maps not just as useful navigational tools but as enchanted objects…. Columbus, himself, for instance, seemed to think maps were endowed with a force that transcended mere matters of geography. They stoked his imagination, inspired the flights of fancy that made his great discovery possible. The sixteenth-century chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that when Columbus gained access to a map the Florentine scientist Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli it “set [his] mind ablaze.”

And who among us hasn’t dreamed of maps: maps where dragons hover beyond the known edge of land; treasure maps promising trunks brimming with pearls and gold; maps to hidden, idyllic places (think about Lost Horizon’s Shangri La)? Harvey notes that maps can cast powerful spells on our imagination:

Throughout the centuries people have viewed maps not just as useful navigational tools but as enchanted objects—what [Joseph] Campbell called ‘amulets’ and [Werner]Muensterberger described as ‘power-imbued fetish[es].”

Harvey seeks Bland, the shadowy man of maps, hoping to penetrate his character—to understand why and how he became the most famous of map thieves. He concurs with Campbell, who he quotes:

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples n the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.

You can see how circuitous Harvey’s journey has become.

Along with Bland, Harvey explores the worlds of mythology and literature. Among the authors in his voluminous research is Aldous Huxley who wrote about what lurks in “‘the antipodes of the mind.’” With this, Harvey

…sensed that I was on a collision course with one of those ‘strange psychological creatures leading an autonomous existence according to the law of their own being.’ It was one discovery, I feared, that would bring no joy at all.

During his search he enters a world he didn’t know existed, a world of persons obsessed. His pursuit of a story about a series of rare-map thefts, and for insight into the character of the thief, eventually twists inward. He comes to the realization that…

We rarely reach our destinations, at least not the ones we set out to find. More often, we arrive one day at a place unfamiliar and unexpected, where all roads suddenly seem to converge and something—the ineffable smell of fate or the stench of defeat or (likeliest of all) sheer exhaustion—tells us the journey is over. In my case it was the knowledge that I had wandered too far. We do not take trips so much as they take us….

Harvey was four years researching and writing The Island of Lost Maps. Along the way, he discovered some truisms about the “strange borderland between inner life and outer experience, dreams and memory, body and soul.” For these, you will want to read the epilogue.

For reading as writers, pay particular attention as to how Miles Harvey’s search to understand Gilbert Bland’s character leads to insight about the author’s own. Besides character, if you are writing about obsession, there’s much to learn by being attentive as to how Harvey layers his story to reveal many facets of this kind of passion.

45 The Island of Lost Maps

Available through your local bookstore or online: The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime