Artists of Darkness

As a novelist, and a very fine one, Patrick McGrath has specialized in the modern Gothic, books in which madmen of one kind or another work their wiles. But his superb and unwholesome new novel, Port Mungo (Knopf; 242 pages), is not about anything so simple as abnormal psychology. It's about the brutal impulses available to anyone, especially artists, who would let slip the loose restraints of civilization.

As a 17-year-old art student in London in the 1950s, Jack Rathbone meets the already established Scottish painter Vera Savage. Thirteen years older, she's a nasty if bewitching specimen — brilliant when she cares to be but also alcoholic, feckless and carnal. The story of their long, dissolute companionship is told to us by Gin Rathbone, Jack's all-too-loving sister, a woman who does not grasp the full dimensions of the tale she is telling.

Vera abruptly sweeps Jack off to the drunken vortex of the Manhattan art world. Jack in turn persuades her to follow him south, first to Havana, then to squalid Port Mungo, on the coast of Honduras. Shabby sex and heavy drinking become the leitmotivs of their lives. Their elder daughter Peg grows up wild and uncombed.

From the first pages we know that Peg's mysterious death will be the linchpin of Port Mungo, a tragedy with layers to be peeled back slowly. The last third of the book is an emotional plunge into a place that the temperate, fastidious Gin is in no way equipped to comprehend. "There are no mysteries," she tries insisting, "only people who conceal, only secrets." In fact, there is no end of mysteries. In his shimmering way, McGrath pulls back the curtain on a terrible one and says, "Look." When he brings you to that place so adroitly, who can say no?