The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘You think I don’t know how this sounds?’
General Franco pops up amid the London hydrangeas in this mischievous tale of repressed memories
LAST DAYS IN
CLEAVER SQUARE by Patrick McGrath
240pp, Hutchison, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99
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You know where you are with a Patrick McGrath novel almost before you begin reading, which is to say you know you’ll soon be aware that you don’t know where you are at all. McGrath’s signature dish is a central protagonist with a flexible relationship to the truth, and to read his novels is invariably to enter a queasy contract with the delusions and fantasies of the madmen and murderers who stalk his fiction.
At least, this time round, it’s clear from the start that something is a bit off: our narrator, a cheerily irascible, twice-widowed poet with a fondness for a mid-morning sherry, confides to his daughter in the very first sentence that he’s seen a ghost, wearing a uniform of green serge “stained with sweat, blood, soil, faeces” and giving a fascist salute. Then, defensively: “You think I don’t know how this sounds?”
We are in 1975 and Francis McNulty is eking out the twilight of his life in the faded Georgian townhouse in south London in which he grew up, watched over by his fretful sister and daughter, his inscrutable Spanish housekeeper and Henry Threshold, his faithless cat. His nights are broken by nightmares of the time he spent as an ambulance driver for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the death by firing squad of his friend, an American surgeon. His days are shadowed by the sickly, spectral manifestation of General Franco who, although still just about alive in Madrid, has taken to popping up among the hydrangeas and occasionally in the wing chair next to McNulty’s bed, weeping. McNulty is also a semi-repressed homosexual, whose father was a drunk and whose mother walked out when he was a child, and who clings obsessively and somewhat deludedly to his romantic selfimage as a freedom fighter – about which, it is amusingly apparent, he can become a bit of a bore. In his quieter moments, he can admit that his life hasn’t added up to much.
This is vintage McGrath material: a narrative patchwork rich in repressed memory, guilt, selfdeception and torment, and full of tantalising stray threads which, if subjected to the smallest pressure, threaten the fabric of the whole. McGrath weaves in obscure trigger warnings almost by stealth (McNulty lets slip that he still sleeps in his parents’ bed, and once glancingly refers to himself as a “she”) and teases us, too, with nomenclature – Cleaver recalls Peter Cleave,
narrator of McGrath’s best-known novel Asylum; the word “cleave” itself holding two opposite meanings; the name of the press that published McNulty’s war poetry is Hyperbole; and what are we to read into the fact that the name Francis is so close to General Francisco Franco?
At the same time, with defiant vitality, the belligerently matter-of-fact and determinedly sane voice of McNulty slices through the psychological gothic and the intimations of mortality that infect everything from autumn leaves to a dripping raincoat. “She looked rather county, a distant relative of the queen perhaps,” he says of his octogenarian sister, Finty, who descends from Mull to care for him.
McGrath excels at the extreme havoc emotional damage can wreak on the mind, but there is the niggling feeling he can play the games on display in this particular novel in his sleep. Yet Last Days in Cleaver Square has an abiding interest in the treacherous relationship between narrative and trauma, and in the closing pages it reshapes our relationship with McNulty one final time. He has taken to meeting in the pub across the square an interested journalist called Hugh Supple (who, McNulty can’t help but note, has a “rather nice bottom”), partly in the hope that telling Hugh the “unspeakable” event at the centre of his life might at last relieve him of its dreadful burden. Like the Ancient Mariner, McNulty feels compelled to hound a stranger with the story of his life. Yet who, he wonders, could ever listen without thinking him insane?
“To live in the world and carry within myself this what – mystery – this knot of fog – impossible to articulate without arousing suspicion that I am yes, going mad – this is my task as I see it.” Given the fabrications, delusions and false leads that dance through his story, how can any reader be confident they know precisely what this “unspeakable” event is? Perhaps, this moving, mischievous novel suggests, certain truths are simply incompatible with the art of storytelling.