Last Days in Cleaver Square

Patrick McGrath

Hutchinson, £16.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

Patrick McGrath’s 1989 debut novel The Grotesque heralded the arrival of a true master of the macabre. Set in a mouldering English manor and revolving around the misfortunes of a family and the machinations of their butler, the book was a slim yet immensely satisfying slice of modern gothic fiction. It delivered shocks through murder, blackmail and a mysterious disappearance, but also elicited laughter in the dark.

Since then, McGrath has continued to produce novels which plunge his reader into chilly hells. His protagonists include psychiatrists (Asylum, Trauma) or psychiatric patients (Spider) afflicted by past horrors or grappling with present obsessions. Some pose a risk to others, most are a danger to themselves. Each book’s narrative is propelled by astute character dynamics and expertly calibrated levels of suspense.

McGrath’s latest novel is a departure of sorts from the norm. On this occasion he dispenses with big thrills, nasty surprises and queasy tension. Which is not to say that Last Days in Cleaver Square is low-wattage – far from it. McGrath charts the wayward progress of an old man at the end of his life as he comes to terms with what he has lost and what he has left. He has his demons and is plagued by a “ghoul”. It could have been a wickedly disturbing tale; instead it is a profoundly moving one, and is all the better for it.

Almost 40 years have elapsed since Francis McNulty walked out one midsummer morning to tend the wounded in Spain during the civil war. “I saw things nobody should ever have to see,” he declares. Now, in London in 1975, he is seeing things that only he can see. Recently, while sitting on a bus, he spotted “that corpulent little monstrosity” General Franco on Lambeth Bridge. Then the generalísimo turned up in his garden and in his house, his uniform shabby, his boots dirty and his face streaked with tears.

Francis’s daughter Gillian assures him it is an apparition, as Franco is dying in Spain. Increasingly concerned, she summons Francis’s artist sister Finty from her retreat on the Isle of Mull for loyal support and also asks her fiancé, fellow civil servant Percy, if her father can join them in their marital home. But Francis has no plans to sell his beloved house in Cleaver Square and swap his personal freedom for “internment”. By staying put and listening to the uninvited guest in the wing chair by his bed, he hopes to understand what kind of a monster he was.

However, it is Francis who opens up when a journalist arrives on the scene and interviews him about his experiences in Spain all those years ago. What begins as a vivid account of his time as an ambulance driver during the siege of Madrid soon turns into what is both a tragic story of betrayal and loss and a guilt-fuelled, grief-ravaged confession. Francis comes to realise that only by visiting Spain again can he confront his past. But will a return trip bring true closure or open old wounds?

Once again McGrath teases his reader with the testimony of an unreliable narrator, in this case one whose reality has become warped by hallucination. Francis, an “unjustly neglected” poet, may have lost his mind, just as he has lost his muse. And yet he retains a firm grip on his memories. Unfolding in either short fragments or long flashbacks, they powerfully convey the atrocities he witnessed in Spain, together with the events which led to the death of “the one man I ever truly loved”.

This is a compelling novel, rich in beauty and insight. Francis might write himself off as “old, mad, haunted”, but for the reader he is vitally and thrillingly alive.