Fiction: Every big city has its cast of ghosts and lost souls, and that's only counting the living. The walking wounded are there to be seen in the busiest street; hurt, alone and desperate.
But never underestimate the dead, it is they who stalk the guilty and, vengeance unsatisfied, walk on forever. None of this would be lost on Patrick McGrath, a committed master of the macabre whose art is rooted in the sickness of the mind. He understands the private hells festering in the minds of men and women: the needs, and the hates, and above all our inexhaustible capacity for self-delusion.
McGrath's latest, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, is his contribution to Bloomsbury's the Writer and the City series, in which the talents of Edmund White on Paris, Peter Carey on Sydney, David Leavitt on Florence and John Banville on Prague have already produced fine examples of idiosyncratic reportage from a select band of good writers. Interestingly, and not entirely unexpectedly, when Patrick McGrath turned his attention to New York, he did so as a storyteller, not an observer. His book, a volume of three near Gothic stories spanning three centuries in the history of New York, has none of the familiar charm White lavishes on Paris, nor does it have the respective wry eloquence of Carey and Banville, yet the best of McGrath's menace is vividly present.
Now settled in New York, McGrath remains one of the most interesting, and possibly the most consistently original of his fiftysomething generation of British writers. Since the publication of his first, and best novel to date, The Grotesque (1989), he has revealed boundless flair for just that, the grotesque. Admittedly, that first book was very funny and clearly a satirical response to the Gothic genre. It triumphed through its narrative voice. McGrath also demonstrated a natural feel for formal, rather old-fashioned and courtly prose.
His prose retains those qualities. The novels which followed The Grotesque, Spider, Dr Haggard's Disease and Asylum, were far darker as McGrath returned to the psychological minefields he had begun to investigate in his fiction debut, the collection Blood and Water and Other Tales. Obsession, levels of mental illness, diseased passion and delusion became his central themes.
The publication of Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution showed him shifting his focus towards a period work. Yet, as ever in his fiction, relationships dictate. Aside from Port Mungo, last year, a surprisingly disappointing and weak homage to Somerset Maugham, McGrath is sufficiently gifted to always expect something special.
His individual approach to personal travel writing is just that. Ghost Town is New York as one might never have considered it and yet on reading McGrath's version, this is precisely the city you may think you know, or always suspected, existed. Here is New York, certainly McGrath's New York and without him even once intruding, although each of his three narrators address the reader with the slightly crazed intensity of the Ancient Mariner in full flow.
Perhaps it is because his fiction invariably becomes a journey in the darker pockets of pain and memory that his decision to describe New York through a trio of tales told by three members of the walking wounded seems fitting.
In the first story, The Year of the Gibbet, an ill and aged man waiting for death looks back 55 years to the day his mother, an American War of Independence patriot, died, largely thanks to his boyhood self's failure of courage. When he begins: "I have been in the town, a disquieting experience, for New York has become a place not so much of death as of the terror of death", it seems curiously contemporary, but as the narrator, a man who has lived his life under the weight of guilt, says: "It is the Fourth of July, 1832, 55 years since my mama died", and he adds, "I have no doubt but that I will follow her before the week is out." Plague is rife in the city and death keeps look out. Meanwhile his long-dead mother, whose skull he examines, watches.
In the second and longest story, Julius, Noah van Horn, a long-dead New York merchant also appears to keep watch, albeit from the portrait that was once painted of him, and which the narrator looks at. The story she tells is of the unhappy merchant, more robber-baron, his three daughters and his youngest child, a long-awaited son, who proved such a disappointment.
Incapable of following his father into business, the boy, Julius, is indulged, thanks to the campaigning patronage of his eldest sister. Through her, he becomes an art student and meets an artist's model with predictable results culminating in violence. Social history and the reality of racism, help flesh out the narrative. All the while, New York itself seethes and rages.
The art world also has a part in the closing narrative, Ground Zero. Here McGrath explores self-delusion through the words of a female psychiatrist turned voyeur who feels she is helping a favoured patient, but is obviously sharing the obsession of which she believes she is trying to cure him.
Although set in the 9/11 aftermath, and on the surface devoid of the darkness of the period stories, this is the darkest and most unsettling narrative.
Not reportage yet convincingly evoking a sense of the horrors endured by New York through its history, McGrath's odyssey, as novelist not reporter, through a place tested by man's flair for evil and deception, is neither love story nor lament. There is a far greater awareness of his almost wilfully offering a multi-layered sense of New York its ghosts, which is true to his fiction and always singular imagination.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Ghost Town By Patrick McGrath Bloomsbury, 243pp. £9.99
