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Title: Port Mungo

Author: Patrick McGrath

Narrator: Jennifer Van Dyck

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-01-09

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

But when Jack and Vera move to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras, Gin is afforded the opportunity to stake her claim to her brother's life again. This feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition leads, inevitably, to a death swathed immediately in mystery, as the various imperatives of passion, narcissism, and creativity hold them all in relentless thrall.

Members Reviews:

Five Stars

I personally like this author, so the book was pretty good,yet not as good as his other books

a great read

Love Patrick McGrath. He's a fine writer and weaves compelling stories. Always engrossing and interesting.

Will work my way through his oeuvre.

Blah, blah, blah....

This novel is very dated. Frankly, I didn't get far enough into it to know what it was about, because it annoyed me. I gave my copy to my district library.

Gothic, with wonderful prose

A friend gave me Port Mungo, saying âit's all about character.â She knows I value character over plot in a book. Of course, it's always best to have some of both. And it is all about character -- or at least, it's both character and prose.

There is a plot, and it's important to the novel, especially to the ending, but you could relate it in just a few paragraphs. And it's so scrambled that you need to figure it out after you've finished the book -- if you care enough to bother. This is the kind of book that book clubs are useful for: the group can piece together what happened better than an individual reader.

I do like character-based novels but I need to feel something for the characters. I didn't like or care about these, none of the five: husband, wife, two daughters, and the husband's sister. That's quite a feat for the author, because I nearly always like at least the protagonist, even if he or she is hugely flawed. And it's not that they were too evil for me, even the 2 protagonists. I just couldn't relate to either of them. They weren't portrayed sympathetically, probably intentionally.

When I'd almost finished the book, I looked up Patrick McGrathâs novels on Goodreads and discovered they're considered to be âgothicâ. I might have read this one differently if I'd known that. I might have expected what the author delivered. The gothic nature wasn't clear to me until the very end. What is clear is that I don't like dark creepy novels.

The most creepy thing about this story is that it's about a man, Jack, but narrated by his sister Gin. No sister should know her brother as intimately as Gin knows Jack. There are nods to âas Jack told me later,â but they aren't enough to explain the knowledge Gin has. And Jack should not have related all that to his sister, if he did. Gin as herself is hardly portrayed; she is all about her relationship to Jack.

The book reminded me a lot of Sarah Watersâ books, at least The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests. Watersâ books have more plot but they're similar in gradually revealing the twisted nature of the protagonists, similar in throwing out clues along the way to the characters and the story's outcome, even as the basic plot continues linearly. I'm already planning to recommend this to a friend who likes Watersâ books.

But I did love the writing, and for that reason alone I'm glad to have read Port Mungo.