by Patrick McGrath (Bloomsbury, £14.99)
"Dread," says Dr Charlie Weir, the psychiatrist-narrator of Trauma, "signals not the imminence of a catastrophic event, but… the memory of a catastrophic event, one that has already happened."
By raising this observation towards the end of his new novel, Patrick McGrath is not only steadying the reader for a denouement, he is describing his own narrative method. Charlie is a New York City psychiatrist helping his patients to deal with traumatic events in their past while trying to sort out his own life, unaware that he too is being manipulated by a hidden event. In little more than 200 spare pages, McGrath digs back through the chronology of Charlie's life to expose his psychological origins. The brilliance of the storytelling lies in the way it gives this retrospective process the illusion of forward momentum: we march onward towards an undisclosed past.
An aghast flooding of the past into the present underlies all of McGrath's work. The son of a superintendent of Broadmoor (pictured, below right, in 1956), he grew up with tales of the criminally insane and, as an author, has produced some of the most realistic interior descriptions of psychiatric experience in English fiction. His is never a Laingian attempt to re-interpret madness as sanity, nor does he entertain a grain of Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest romanticism, but he does reveal a profound understanding that psychotic states, however deranged, remain real states of being with real histories. Now aged 58, and a long-time resident of New York, McGrath has not been a prolific author so much as a concentrated one, his seven novels and two collections of short stories reworking and refining a particular technique. This has sometimes led him to be dismissed as a writer limited to the psychological thriller, or a modern vein of the gothic. But this concentration is precisely what gives his work its power, producing an oeuvre that aspires to the coherence of genre—not in the formulaic sense of crime or science fiction, but in the way that Edgar Allen Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson generated distinct, imaginative worlds that constantly reappeared and developed through their stories.
In medical terms, the symptoms of psychological trauma include flashbacks, nightmares, excessive emotional arousal and hyper-vigilant anxiety. For the trauma victim, it feels as if a past danger is still imminent, or the original event is still happening. McGrath's fiction produces a frisson of similar reactions in his reader. This springs from the way past and present converge in the consciousness of the narrator and, therefore, the reader. As Charlie Weir explains, "the event is always happening now, in the present, for the first time." By no means McGrath's richest or most powerful novel, Trauma is nevertheless a consummately controlled minor piece that clarifies much of what his previous efforts have been doing.
Trauma's genesis may well relate to a previous short story of McGrath's, "Ground Zero," which deals with the distorting effect of the "imaginal trauma" inflicted on thousands of New Yorkers by the collapse of the twin towers. Out of catastrophe, the mind creates ghosts. In Trauma itself, Charlie Weir's professional history lies in the treatment of veterans of the Vietnam war, one of whom was his wife's beloved brother, Danny. Unwisely and unethically attempting to treat a family member, his mishandling of his brother-in-law ended with Danny's suicide, leading to the break-up of Charlie's marriage, precipitating, in turn, the disintegration of his life. Or, at least, that's the way Charlie interprets things as he attempts to replace or fix the broken bits of his life. This effort requires a constant trawling back through time: to a few days ago, to the 1970s, and deep into the obscurity of childhood. Charlie's voice is so reasonable that it only gradually becomes apparent that it is, in fact, pathological. The feeling of dread pervading the story is due to something that Charlie hasn't even considered, but which has been happening to him, in the present, all the time he has been telling it.
The unreliable narrator may have become a trivial and irritating plaything of postmodern writing, but for McGrath it is an irrefutable fact, a rooted reality of storytelling. When he uses professional doctors as narrators, it is because they provide a semblance of verisimilitude which disguises their undisclosed motivations—something you don't need a literary theorist to remind you is true of all historians and storytellers. When, on the other hand, he uses an explicitly insane narrator, like Spider, it is with a deep and refined understanding of what it actually feels like to attempt a construction of history and reality out of the figments of psychosis.
It's not giving away the story of Trauma to say that it ends with Charlie going back home. Dread may be discovered in the creeping realisation that origins are inescapable. For McGrath, the notion of a home is one of disinterring those origins: the people, places and forces that made you before you were even aware you were being made.
