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Summary
Summary
Master storyteller Patrick McGrath--author of the critically acclaimed novelAsylumand a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction--once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay,Martha Peakeenvelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to a flame-haired heroine who will live in the imagination long after the last page is turned. Settled with our narrator beside a crackling fire, we hear of the poet and smuggler Harry Peake--how Harry lost his wife, Grace, in a tragic fire that left him horribly disfigured; how he made a living displaying his deformed spine in the alehouses of eighteenth-century London; and how his only solace was his devoted daughter, Martha, who inherited all of his fire but none of his passion for cheap gin. As the drink eats away at Harry's soul, it opens ancient wounds; when he commits one final act of unspeakable brutality, Martha, fearing for her life, must flee for the American colonies. Once safely on America's shores, Martha immerses herself in the passions of smoldering rebellion. But even in this land of new beginnings, she is unable to escape the past. Caught up in a web of betrayals, she redeems herself with one final, unforgettable act of courage. Superbly plotted and wholly absorbing,Martha Peakeis an edge-of-your-seat shocker that is crafted with the psychological precision Patrick McGrath's fans have come to expect. A writer whose novelsThe New York Times Book Reviewhas called both "mesmerizing" and "brilliant," McGrath applies his remarkable imaginative powers to a fresh and broad historical canvas.Martha Peakeis the poignant, often disturbing tale of a child fighting free of a father's twisted love, and of the colonists' struggle to free themselves from a smothering homeland. It is Patrick McGrath's finest novel yet.
Author Notes
Patrick McGrath was born in London in 1950 and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was the medical superintendent for many years. He attended Stonyhurst College and received his BA in English from the University of London. Among other jobs, he worked as an orderly in a mental hospital and as a teacher before becoming a writer. He is seen as a leader of the neo-Gothic writers; his books include Spider, The Grotesque, Port Mungo, Trauma and Asylum. His novel Martha Peake won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy.
McGrath resides in New York City and London.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Known as a spinner of elegant neo-gothic thrillersDthe sort full of psychological tension but narrow in scopeDMcGrath tackles a much broader canvas in his sweeping new novel about the American Revolution. At the heart of McGrath's tale are a fatherDHarry Peake, an energetic Cornwall man broken by calamityDand his daughter and helpmate, Martha. Like many of his countrymen, Harry smuggles to avoid the excise, but after a nearly bungled job, his spine is broken and he is transformed into a misshapen monster. He sets off for London with eight-year-old Martha, earning money at first by exhibiting his deformed spine and later by performing his own Ballad of Joseph Tresilian, an allegory about the king's tyranny over the colonists. Although Harry's reputation growsDenough to attract the attention of Lord Drogo, an anatomist interested in collecting rare bonesDhe succumbs to drink and far worse, endangering now teenaged Martha and forcing her to flee to her cousins in America. But it is 1774, and those cousins, living in a fishing community north of Boston, are committed patriots. Martha throws her lot in with the Americans, but her loyalty to her father threatens her and the other colonists and, finally, determines her destiny. All this is narrated half a century later by Ambrose Tree, nephew of Lord Drogo's assistant, Dr. William Tree. Like many of McGrath's earlier narrators, Ambrose is unreliable; he recounts, and embellishes, the tales his uncle William tells at night in drafty Drogo Hall. As Ambrose's questionable assumptions are proved true or false, what is betrayed is not the oh-so-familiar black heart of the narrator but the sweet heroism of the protagonists. McGrath (Asylum) takes a big risk, but the result is an invigorating take on the Revolution, just the tonic for even the most jaded reader during this election season. Agent, Amanda Urban at ICM. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Fans of the gothic genre won't be disappointed by McGrath's latest novel, which features gloomy manors, tormented souls, and a persecuted heroine. The novel is narrated by Ambrose Tree, a young man who has come to see his dying uncle, William, and perhaps inherit his estate, Drogo Hall. William captures Ambrose's imagination with the story of Harry Peake, a smuggler whose spine is crushed and deformed in a fire that he accidently causes. After the fire, Harry leaves his home in Cornwall for London, taking his eldest daughter, Martha, with him. When Harry's drinking puts her in danger, Martha, now 16, flees to Drogo Hall to seek refuge with William and his mentor, Lord Drogo, an anatomist who is fascinated by Harry's spine. William and Drogo shelter Martha, but she continues to sneak out of the house to see Harry until, in a moment of drunken brutality, he rapes her, and she becomes pregnant with his child. Devastated, she flees to America to live with relatives and becomes involved with the burgeoning American Revolution. Caught up in the tale of Harry and Martha, Ambrose fills in the parts of their stories that William omits or refuses to discuss, only to discover in the end that all his assumptions were not true. A novel that follows gothic conventions and stereotypes only to turn them on their heads in the end, Peake's tale will consume readers as much as it does Ambrose. --Kristine Huntley
Guardian Review
After the modern Gothic of Asylum , with its sexual obsession and psychiatric disorders, Patrick McGrath has plunged wholeheartedly into the 18th-century heyday of the genre. He offers in Martha Peake an accomplished masterclass, with every Gothic standby in place: the dark tale in a crumbling stately pile, winds howling outside; the antihero, heroic in his flaws; the coldly dangerous nobleman and his hunched, leering servant; the hand falling on the shoulder as the candle winks out and the swoon signalling horrors beyond words. McGrath has admitted that "I deliberately feed the imagination by reading", and historical pastiche is a readerly endeavour, uniting writer and audience through shared bookshelves and chummy nods at the correct conventions. The author is applauded for the linguistic equivalent of keeping digital watches out of shot, and purple passages read as literary authenticity. There is an especial danger of merely stylish exercise when reanimating a beast as easily identikit as the Gothic novel. But like the best of the genre, Martha Peake transcends its tics and types; they become, as in that other great Gothic pastiche, Northanger Abbey , cunning authorial tools to tempt reader and narrator alike. The story ranges from the smugglers' coves of 1730s Cornwall to the "great squat toad" of London and across the Atlantic to the tumult of the American Revolution. Throughout we hear the beat of drums and tramp of red-coated "foot-soldiers of the Empire", the tavern and coffee-shop grumbles of free-thinkers and free-traders alike. McGrath evokes the dream of that "great good place" America in old England, itching under corruption and poverty, with as much verve and precision as he paints the reality of emigration and uprising. Harry Peake, his splendidly Gothic fallen hero with "the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet", is known as "Harry America" for his huge rebellious spirit. Like Mr Rochester, he is too striking to be handsome; a keen reader of Milton, he shares Satan's self-imposed Hell. When his wife is killed and his back broken in a fire caused by his own drunken carelessness, he comes to London to expiate the guilt symbolised in that misshapen spine, displaying himself as a Gothic freak show. His very deformity is described in awed, admiring tones throughout, the hump "like a fin . . . stretched taut upon its fragile outcrop of flaring bone". From these depths "the Cripplegate Monster" exalts himself through ballads of such power that they can hush a rowdy tavern, until he sinks again through a fog of madness and bad gin into a lower Hell, raping and impregnating his own daughter. It is Martha who titles the book, and the story is as much hers as Harry's; from a pattern of filial devotion she becomes a damsel in the deepest distress, fleeing to Boston for refuge from her beloved father, and finally an emblem of the Revolution itself. These are the larger-than-life subjects of the novel; the tellers of the tale proclaim themselves as minor characters, but are decidedly more devious than that. "As for me, I shall soon sink from sight and you will forget me altogether," promises Ambrose Tree, who is hearing the story from his dying uncle William, once assistant to the anatomist Lord Drogo, who took a professionally morbid interest in Harry's spine. However, William's opium haze and inconsistencies lead Ambrose first to expand on the "bare bones" of the story from his own "ardent sympathetic understanding" and then to wrest control of the narrative altogether. His self-medication against marsh fever only increases his fervour: heroising his subjects, he creates romantic reveries and absurd twists from a few epistolary scraps. Caught up in the logic of myth - and sweeping the reader along in its powerful tide - he accedes to the demands of "poetic intuition" and "the weight of symbolic necessity", passing on to Harry's child his mark of Cain, the terrible beauty of a misshapen back. By letting Ambrose's fevered imagination loose, McGrath demonstrates the mythologising process; it is this same "symbolic necessity" which elevates Martha into an emblem of rebellion at the cost of her complex and mundane humanity. Martha Peake 's great achievement is to encompass both the minute details and grand dreams of life, showing how out of the two we spin our stories. Ambrose develops from a captive audience into a manipulative storyteller, exercising "the full powers of imagination - intuition - sympathy - and art". As his tale bursts out of its narrative confines and into his own life, we see the dangerous powers of that seductive sliding scale. And the mind itself is revealed as the true Gothic element; it is the narrator's sensibilities and the reader's racing heart which conjure the key turning in the lock, the ghostly tread in the corridor. Caption: article-mcgrath.1 [Patrick McGrath] has admitted that "I deliberately feed the imagination by reading", and historical pastiche is a readerly endeavour, uniting writer and audience through shared bookshelves and chummy nods at the correct conventions. The author is applauded for the linguistic equivalent of keeping digital watches out of shot, and purple passages read as literary authenticity. There is an especial danger of merely stylish exercise when reanimating a beast as easily identikit as the Gothic novel. But like the best of the genre, [Martha Peake] transcends its tics and types; they become, as in that other great Gothic pastiche, Northanger Abbey , cunning authorial tools to tempt reader and narrator alike. By letting [Ambrose]'s fevered imagination loose, McGrath demonstrates the mythologising process; it is this same "symbolic necessity" which elevates Martha into an emblem of rebellion at the cost of her complex and mundane humanity. Martha Peake 's great achievement is to encompass both the minute details and grand dreams of life, showing how out of the two we spin our stories. Ambrose develops from a captive audience into a manipulative storyteller, exercising "the full powers of imagination - intuition - sympathy - and art". As his tale bursts out of its narrative confines and into his own life, we see the dangerous powers of that seductive sliding scale. And the mind itself is revealed as the true Gothic element; it is the narrator's sensibilities and the reader's racing heart which conjure the key turning in the lock, the ghostly tread in the corridor. - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
Best known for such vivid and thoughtful literary thrillers as Spider (1990) and Asylum (1997), McGrath extends his range with this ambitious historical melodrama, a tale both as seductively fascinating and as ungainly as its boldly imagined antihero. Harry Peake, a fatherless and willful Cornishman (with just a dash of Emily Bröntes Heathcliff in his makeup), sublimates his volatile energies to become a successful fisherman and smuggler (as well as a largely self-taught poet)until he impetuously causes the devastating fire in which his wife perishes, leaving Harry permanently crippled and reduced to supporting himself and his young daughter by exhibiting his deformity (as the Cripplegate Monster) and unlikely book-learning, in the taverns of late18th-century London. In a series of rich Hogarthian scenes, McGrath memorably portrays the mutually dependent love between Harry and the fiercely devoted Martha, his surrender to the curse of drinking that his always plagued him, and the subsequent act of violence that destroys their closeness and separates them forever. Meanwhile, the scientific interest taken in Harrys unique physical condition by wealthy anatomist Lord Drogowhich eventually occasions the telling of Harrys story, to the young narrator Ambrose, who relays it to us, with his own embellishmentsresults in Marthas emigration to safety with relatives in Massachusetts Bay Colony, on the eve of the American Revolution. A rather tortured plot twist involves her in an exchange of secrets whose upshot ironically casts her as a heroine and martyr to the Revolution, and McGrath brings it all to an even more ironic conclusion, as Ambrose discovers the full truth of Lord Drogos machinations and of Harrys arduous final pilgrimage toward forgiveness and rest. Ferociously imagined, intensely atmospheric, often powerfully compelling, but nonetheless weakened by far too many reversals, surprises, and interlocking narrative levels. Martha Peake delivers the goods, but wraps them in so much complexity and fustian that their brilliance is needlessly shrouded and muted.
Library Journal Review
Despite the subtitle, this is not a historical novel in the conventional sense but another of McGrath's (Asylum, The Grotesque) twisted neo-Gothic tales of psychological suspense. Like all good horror stories, it opens on a dark and stormy night with narrator Ambrose Tree sitting by the fire in gloomy Drogo Hall listening to his old uncle William tell the story of Harry Peake and his 16-year-old daughter, Martha. A Cornish ex-smuggler whose spine had been crushed in a tragic accident, Harry makes his living displaying his deformity in the pubs of London. This attracts the sinister attentions of noted anatomist Lord Francis Drogo and "resurrection man" Clyte, an Igor-like dealer in fresh cadavers. When a drunken Harry brutally attacks Martha, she flees to Drogo Hall, where William, Lord Drogo's assistant, helps her to escape to the rebellious American Colonies. Obsessed with the story of Harry and Martha, Ambrose fills in the parts that his uncle omits with his own speculations (did Lord Drogo murder Harry to collect his spine?), and his narrative becomes more feverish and grotesque: "I am convinced that history can unhinge the brain, that a man may be driven mad by historyD!" Although entertaining, the novel's tricks and manipulations become a bit tedious, with a less-than-surprising conclusion that makes for a not especially satisfying read. For McGrath fans and larger collections.DWilda Williams, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
chapter 1 It is a black art, the writing of a history, is it not?--to resurrect the dead, and animate their bones, as historians do? I think historians must be melancholy creatures, rather like poets, perhaps, or doctors; but then, what does it matter what I think? This is not my story. This is the story of a father and his daughter, and of the strange and terrible events that tore them apart, so it is to those two unhappy souls that I would direct your gaze. As for me, I shall soon sink from sight, and you will forget me altogether. No, I am merely the one who happened upon the story, as you might happen upon, say, a cache of letters in the attic of an ancient uncle's country house; and blowing away the dust of decades, and untying the ribbon that binds them, finding within those crumbling pages a tale of passion so tragic, yet so sublime--as to transform, in that instant, the doddering relict in the bath-chair below to a spirited youth with a fiery heart and the blood of a hero racing in his veins! Now in those days, as it happens, I did indeed have an ancient uncle, and for some time I had been aware that his health was failing; and being his only surviving relation, I had speculated that his property would come to me when he passed on. The old man had been living a life of seclusion ever since the death of his benefactor, the great anatomist Lord Drogo, so when I received his letter, asking me to come to him at once, I wasted no time. I need not describe to you the journey I took across the Lambeth Marsh, nor the house itself, for both Drogo Hall and its drear landscape will emerge strongly in what follows. Suffice to say that I rode across the marsh alone, and carried a loaded pistol with me; and upon arriving at dusk, I was admitted by a little bent man called Percy, who took me up the great staircase to my uncle's study and then vanished without a word. I found the old doctor seated close to a blazing coal fire in a small gloomy room with a heavy Turkey carpet on the floor and thick dark curtains on the windows. He had a blanket on his knees, a tome in his lap, and a jorum of Hollands-and-water close to hand. As he turned toward the door I saw at once that he could not be long for this world, so frail did he appear, his skin in the firelight as white and brittle as paper. But on recognizing me a light came up in those dim and milky eyes, he fixed me with a gimlet stare and cried to me to come in--come in, for the love of God!--for the draft was a chill one; and he pointed with a trembling finger to the aged leather armchair on the other side of the fireplace. But still I stood there in the open door, rooted to the spot. I was transfixed by the painting hanging over the mantelpiece. I had never seen it before. It was the portrait of a robust, broad-shouldered man of between thirty and forty years. He stood against a wild moorland scene, a pine flattening in the gale on the brow of a distant hill, and rags of black cloud flying across the sky. He wore neither hat nor wig, and his long hair was tied at the back with a blue ribbon, a few strands torn free by the wind. His shirt was open at the throat, his skin was pale, and his eyes were like great dark pools, full of life and full of pain but hooded, somehow, lost in shadow as they gazed off into some unknown horizon. It was not a handsome face, it was carved too rough for that, but it was a strong, complicated face, hatched and knotted with sorrow and passion, a big stubborn chin uplifted--the whole head uplifted!--lips unsmiling and slightly parted, and the expression one of defiance, yes, and purpose. I felt at once that the artist, for all that he had caught some fleeting expression of this fierce, romantic spirit, could not have done him justice, nobody could have done justice to this man. My uncle William nodded at me with a pursed smile as I closed the door behind me and moved to the chair by the fire, my gaze still fixed on the painting, and slowly sat down. "You know who he is, eh?" "No, sir," I said, "I do not." "No? Then shall I tell you?" It was Harry Peake. The name clawed at the skirts of memory as I sat down by the fire and warmed my jaded heart on the image of that proud rough man. America--for some reason as I gazed at him I thought of America--I thought of the Revolutionary War, and of all that I had learned of that great conflict from my mother, herself an American who pined in exile for her country every day of my childhood. An incident by the sea--a burning village filled with women and children--a red-haired girl with a musket at her shoulder--these ideas tentatively emerged from out of the mind's mist, but all else remained shrouded and obscure. I found myself sitting forward in my chair and staring into the fire as I tried to remember. At last I looked up, and told my uncle I saw a village in flames somewhere on the coast of North America, but no more than that. For some moments there was little sound in the room but the hiss of the coal in the hearth, and the wind rising in the trees outside. "Come, Ambrose, sit closer to the fire," he murmured at last, turning away from me, seizing up the bottle of Hollands at his elbow. "Here, fill your glass. You shall hear it all. I have held it in my heart too long. It has blighted me. I am withered by it. He never got to America. God knows he wanted to." My uncle put his fingertips together beneath his chin and closed his eyes. Silence. "Many a man," I murmured, "has never got to America." A sort of sigh, at this, and then silence again. I waited. When next he spoke it was with a clipped asperity that belied the desperate pathos of what he told me. To know Harry Peake, he said, you must first know what he suffered. Then you will understand why he fell. Why he turned into a monster. "A monster--!" " 'Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families'--eh?" He was quoting an author, but I missed the allusion. "He devoured his young--?" Then I had it. Tom Paine. "Lost his mind. What a waste. What a mind." "But who was he?" Here my uncle turned to me, and again fixed me with that gimlet eye. "One of those cursed few," he said, "to whom Nature in her folly gave the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet." And so it began. Much of the detail I have had to supply from my own imagination, that is, from the ardent sympathetic understanding of the tragic events my uncle William described. His recall was patchy, for time had worn his memory through as though it were an old coat. The seams had split open, there were fragments of alien fabric, rudely stitched, and everywhere the pattern was obscured by foreign substances, such as those that were liberally splattered about the papers I later received from him, blood, soil, gin, etc. So I was forced to expand upon the materials he gave me. But when it was over I felt that I understood, I understood the extraordinary life not only of Harry Peake, but of his daughter also, of Martha Peake, who died at the hands of her own countrymen, and who, by her sacrifice, helped to create the republic to which my mother swore allegiance, and whose spirit I have come to love. Later that evening the wind came up, it started to rain, and I was glad indeed of the shelter of Drogo Hall, for I had no desire to be out on the Lambeth Marsh in such conditions. We supped in the grand dining room downstairs, and a strange meal it was, the two of us up at the end of the table, a single branch of candles to light us, the wind howling about the house and that peculiar little man Percy, now wearing a ratty scratch wig, presumably on account of the formality of the occasion, serving us with silent swiftness, appearing suddenly out of the darkness with tureen or decanter and just as suddenly vanishing again. From the high, dark-panelled walls of the dining room the portraits of the earls of Drogo of centuries past peered down at us through the gloom, and our con- versation seemed at times to struggle forward as though burdened by the span of years that separated us from the events of which we spoke, indeed that separates me now from that dismal stormy night so long ago. My uncle sat in the great chair at the head of the table, a tiny slumped figure against the vast gloom behind him, and picked at his food with sharp little jabs like a bird. We ate cold mutton and boiled potatoes. He had frequent recourse to the decanter, which was filled with a sweet Rhenish wine, and with every glass his speech grew more fluting, more rapid, and more inflected with the fancies of a failing mind, such that I had constantly to steer him away from the wild places where he seemed inclined to wander, and back to the track of his narrative. And all the while the silent Percy flickered in and out of the candlelight like a moth, again and again refilling my uncle's tall crystal goblet with that undrinkable sweet white wine. Oh, we talked on long after the last dish had been removed, and the candles had burned down to guttering stubs, and still the wind could be heard out on the marsh, and the boughs of the trees slapped against the high windows of the house. Later I made my way upstairs with a candle, to a cold room with a damp bed where I lay sleepless for many hours as the storm exhausted itself and I attempted to digest not only my uncle's mutton but his story as well. Excerpted from Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution by Patrick McGrath All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
