Trauma

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Compelling psychodrama - Rated
Almost without exception, Patrick McGrath's novels are about intense, violent affairs, their inherent melodrama underplayed by the author's beautiful, clear prose which takes a detached (sometimes unhinged) analytical view of the subject, usually from a medical or psychiatric perspective. Like Asylum, which this latest novel perhaps most resembles, (not least of which is in its admirably concise and self-explanatory title), Trauma throws a lot of complicating psychological and behavioural complications into the mix - sibling rivalry, damaged people, Oedipal and Electra complexes and more Freudian analysis than you can shake a big stick at. It's lucidly insane, which is as concise a description of McGrath's work as I find.

Essentially then, there is no dramatic shift in subject matter or style for McGrath in Trauma, with a flawed or unreliable narrator (this one being a psychiatrist obviously has a tendency to be over-analytical of other's motives and behaviour), and clashes between rational analysis and sexual passions, between seemingly rational-minded individuals and artistic creative geniuses - so it's not just Asylum that comes to mind here, but also Port Mungo.

What is different in Trauma, and confirmed in the author's previous (fabulous) collection of two short novellas, Ghost Town, is the growing influence and importance of living in New York that is playing a greater part in McGrath's work, the author managing to channel both the passionate seething of life with the isolating factors and anonymity of living there. Slowly but surely then, the depictions of madness in McGrath books is extending from the individual to the collective madness of America, without losing any of the riveting personal drama in his work.