The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath is a mix of English country gothic and wicked social satire. With a plot that is twisted and mysterious, and writing that is sharp, and slyly witty, I was off keel and thoroughly entertained from start to finish. I was also grossed out by the details McGrath offers up with glee; I could just picture his sneaky smile as he wrote out such tasty morsels as, “cocooned in bone, I pupate behind a blank and lizardlike stare, as my body is slowly consumed by its own metabolism” and “the barn suddenly seemed to grow very dark, and in my own mind I could hear that terrible chopping in the night, the terrible chopping that woke George from sleep, and I could see old John grinning in the gloom of the shed as he chopped up what he’d found out on the marsh.” And I could hear McGrath’s deep-throated chuckles as he wrote out the description, “Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and her throat swung bagged and cross-hatched from a wrinkled knob of chin flanked by rouged jowls loosely depending from lumpy cheekbones. Powerful gusts of stale scent emanated from the crannies of her person; the little dog was curled in her lap like a hairy tumor”, and tossed out this line of simple but grim profundity: “The living, I think, are larvae of the dead — dead bodies at an early stage of development.” Ugh and chilled wonder: McGrath is a genius of gothic writing.
The plot of The Grotesque revolves around a country lord besieged by evil — or is he just insane? — at Crook, his home and manor. The atmosphere at Crook is appropriately rainy and creepy, surrounded by drowning marshland and gloomy villagers. The manor itself has the requisite crumbling mortar, failing plumbing, and the Coal family motto inscribed over the family fireplace, Nil Desperandum, “there is no reason to despair.”
Actually there are many reasons for Coal to despair: the new butler and his machinations (real or imagined), a sherry-tippling cook, a weedy future son-in-law to be, a non-existent sex life, lifelong work studying a dinosaur that no one cares about, and a wife looking for a reason to confess to the local priest.
The “Grotesque” of the title refers to the crippling of Coal as well as to the workings of his mind, his very florid and lurid and putrid imaginings of everything going on behind his back. When the daughter’s beau goes missing, Coal’s imagination goes to work picturing how and where he has disappeared, and when the bones of the poor boy, chopped up and chewed upon, are discovered in the marsh, the wild imagination of Coal goes into overdrive, much to the reader’s back-chilling entertainment. Coal doesn’t limit his loopy, leering imagination to murder, but is just as talented in envisioning all kinds of couplings, gropings, and even hangings. He should have given up the amateur paleontology work and put his efforts in the writing gothic romances — and paid a bit more attention to the hiring of the servants. He could have put his talent at grotesquerie to good use, and not found himself in a wheelchair facing a wall, while listening to the Foxtrot on the gramophone play on and on.
