of his historical location. Indeed, all of McGrath’s novels, even those overtly playing with the monstrous and parodic, are firmly rooted in time and place. The past weighs heavily on his characters, returning often to haunt them, and on his narratives, challenging his contemporary readers to reflect on its legacy.
Madness – a recurrent theme in the fiction and explicitly addressed in Spider and Asylum – is always specifically located and contextualized. Moreover, mental disorder is rendered in McGrath’s fiction through ordered and elegant prose, so that reading about such extremes of human experience becomes a matter of aesthetics. His skill in tackling the technical challenges of representing madness is related to his capacity to negotiate the finely balanced boundaries between intertextuality, irony and pastiche. Often, when the reader assumes that the techniques of realism are being utilized, the ground is at its most treacherous; in some respects, Asylum is more Gothic than The Grotesque. His first-person narrators inevitably give their own perspectives: through the voices of Dennis Cleg in Spider and Edward Haggard in Dr Haggard’s Disease, the reader is seduced into seeing the world through the eyes of the mentally disturbed. Some times in the telling of others’ stories these narrators by implication tell their own (Gin Rathbone in Port Mungo and Peter Cleave in Asylum, for example). McGrath sometimes adopts the cool scientific tones of the medical practitioner in order to expose the shakiness of the foundations of such purportedly objective discourse. Through the voices of Peter Cleave, of the anonymous narrator of ‘Ground Zero’ (the last story in Ghost Town) and, most recently, of Charlie Weir in Trauma, psychiatry is shown to be more deeply involved with its subjects than it would claim – or than the reader finds comfortable.
McGrath’s fiction is charted chronologically in this book for two reasons. For those interested in a particular text, this will provide focused discussion; more importantly, perhaps, this approach demonstrates the ways in which themes and tropes in the earlier fiction have found more complex and subtle expression in the later work, as the exploration of the haunting effects of history (both personal and public) takes a transatlantic turn. Chapter 1 explores the early short stories, identifying tropes and themes that signal a parodic engagement with other Gothic writing, some of which surface again in the later fiction. Clearly, homage is being paid to various antecedents in these tales where the past and future are more in evidence than the present. Edgar Allan Poe haunts the pages of many: in the decadent or decayed mansions of ‘Marmilion’ and ‘Blood and Water’ and the live entombment of the narrator of ‘The Smell’, for example. The colonial Gothic of writers like Somerset Maugham and H. Rider Haggard is echoed in stories like ‘The Lost Explorer’ and ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’ and ‘Blood Disease’. The transgression of boundaries characteristic of all Gothic fiction manifests itself either horrifically or comically (and sometimes both) in all the stories. Crime takes a funny turn in ‘The Arnold Crombeck Story’, and perverse bodies of unstable identity are in evidence in ‘The Angel’, ‘Blood and Water’ and ‘The Skewer’; cannibalism makes an appearance in ‘The Boot’s Tale’ and, more obliquely, ‘Blood Disease’. Some of the more eccentric features of earlier Gothic fiction and film are in evidence: monkeys (in the tradition of Sheridan LeFanu’s short story ‘Green Tea’) make a sinister and enigmatic appearance, both in ‘Blood Disease’ and in ‘Marmilion’; hands – either disembodied (as in ‘Hand of a Wanker’ or attached to the wrong part of the anatomy (as in ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’) – take on their own agency. Apocalyptic themes are approached through body horror and black comedy in ‘The Boot’s Tale’ and ‘The E(rot)ic Potato’. In these early tales, too, figures that will recur in the later fiction make their first appearance: the orthodox medical man (in the peripheral figure of the surgeon, Mr Piker-Smith,38 in ‘The Lost Explorer’ and the gross and ill-fated figure of Dr Cadwallader in ‘Blood and Water’) and the psychoanalyst, in various manifestations, in ‘The Skewer’. The tortured artist who becomes a central figure in Asylum and Port Mungo is the focus in ‘Lush Triumph ant’. This is a story set in New York, a location even more decadently realized in ‘The Angel’ and one to which McGrath was to return in his later fiction. The latter story exemplifies the vexed relationship Gothic has always had with religion and which also surfaces in different ways in ‘Ambrose Syme’, with its murderous paedophilic priest, and ‘Hand of a Wanker’, a tale of Babylon on the Hudson. The preoccupation with perverse and unstable bodies that will surface again in the later fiction provides the thematic focus for ‘The Angel’ and ‘Blood and Water’. McGrath’s first novel, The Grotesque (1989), is also discussed in chapter 1, with particular reference to its self-conscious pastiche of the Gothic.
Chapter 2 considers the three novels of the 1990s, Spider (1990), Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993) and Asylum (1996), which explore madness from different perspectives. McGrath has explained:
In my first stories I sort of stumbled into the first-person narrator which turned into the unreliable narrator. What I’d actually done was reinvent the wheel, but at the time I didn’t know that and it felt like an exciting breakthrough. After that it was a short step to creating narrators whose unreliability is a psychological dysfunction.39
These novels are less playful than the stories and darkly haunted by Gothic in their representation of taboo and transgression. All are set in a murky and eccentric mid twentieth-century England. This retrospective emphasis provides a setting through which McGrath, himself a child of the 1950s, draws on his own background to provide the stuff of fiction. A childhood spent on the estate of Broadmoor, one of Britain’s high-security mental hospitals, and a father happy to share anecdotes from his work as its chief psychiatrist at the dinner table meant that he had plenty of material.40 The third of these novels is, as its title suggests, set in such a hospital. It is in this novel that the figure of the artist appears again, this time as a patient and convicted killer.
McGrath was to devote an entire novel to the artist in Port Mungo (2004), which is one of the novels discussed in chapter 3. This chapter considers the first three works from the twenty-first century, Martha Peake (2000) and Ghost Town (2005) as well as Port Mungo. In this period of his fiction, issues of historicity, national and personal identity and the figure of the artist become central concerns. Martha Peake takes a final self-reflexive look at earlier period Gothic as a way of enacting the abandonment of a culturally haunted England in favour of the New World, a movement that parallels McGrath’s own departure for North America after university. As the later fiction shows, however, haunting is not confined to the Old World. The weight of history and how it has been constructed continue to make themselves felt in the present of this fiction. These novels and stories continue to probe the haunting of the past and, in so doing, are themselves haunted by ghosts of the Gothic. In the Afterword, McGrath’s repudiation of the term ‘Gothic’ is considered in relation to his most recent novel, Trauma, together with the implications for his future work.
The Short Stories
The motifs, themes and modes of writing to be found in McGrath’s later fiction have their genesis in the early short stories. The precarious and sometimes gleeful balancing of comedy and horror in many of them implies a consciousness of the hybridity of Gothic, used to advantage in a distinctive way. In an interview with Gilles Menegaldo in 1997, McGrath acknowledged his parodic relationship with Gothic conventions in the early work:
the
