INTERVIEW:Patrick McGrath writes with effortless control and panther-like grace - his paragraphs stalk the reader sentence by sentence, then spring for the kill, writes Arminta Wallace.
HE LOOKS EVERY bit as raffish and dangerous as the photos on his book jackets, but the author of such dark and disturbing novels as Port Mungoand the recently-published, and extravagantly-praised, Trauma, turns out to be amiable, articulate, and not at all fazed by his own fictions. "I'm pretty committed to the idea that we're all unreliable narrators in our own lives," he says, as calmly as if he was commenting on the weather.
Great news for readers. Not so good for interviewers. If I ask him about himself, what will he tell me? Something totally phoney? "I don't know if it would be phoney, exactly," he says. "But I know that it would be contradicted by my wife, or my brother, or my best friend, who would say 'That's not it at all', and would give their impression of what I'm like. So in that sense, my reliability is only as good as my subjective grasp of who I am and what I'm up to."
He offers a lop-sided grin. "But if the question is, 'what do I like doing', I could answer that." Let's make that the question, then. "I like going to Belize, where my wife and I have built a house on the beach, and we have a boat," is the prompt answer. "Going down there is, for me, about becoming a different person - assuming a whole different personality that's very definitely not urban, and not intellectual, and not anything like the other life."
The "other life" is in New York, where McGrath fetched up many years ago "in hot pursuit," as he puts it, "of a Hungarian painter", and where he now lives with his wife Maria Aitken. New York plays a central role in Trauma. McGrath portrays the city as a kind of pulsating star, "roaring and surging" with immense energies, its untidy cacophony woven right into the narrative. "I think the energy of the place was what was so startling about it when I first got there," he says. "An energy that seemed on the verge of chaos. You didn't quite know what was holding the city together, so there was also a sense that it could all go badly wrong."
But that was then. These days, he says - somewhat wistfully - New York is very different. "It's a much more orderly place now in comparison with the 1970s. Which, in a way, is why I wanted to set the book in that decade. It was very interesting to me, that conflicted, damaged, dirty, dangerous New York. I've got a psychiatrist who's working with returning war veterans and who's beginning to fall apart himself, so it seemed like the ideal place to set the story."
Though he was born in London, McGrath has Irish roots. His mother was born in Co Mayo, his father in Clare. "It was the usual Catholic family," he says. "Childhood holidays tended to be with aunts and uncles and cousins in Galway. The link to Ireland was always very strong." Unlike many London-Irish families his, however, was a professional one. His father was chief psychiatrist at Broadmoor. Does this explain his fondness for forensic dissection of the internal dynamics of family life?
"I seem to gravitate towards artists and doctors of one sort or another," he says, with a rueful smile. "I feel I ought to break out of that and find other occupations for my characters. But for the novelist, there's something terribly attractive about artists and doctors. They cover both sides of the psyche. The psychiatrist can voice all the things that the novelist wants to voice: his character's motivation, and the way in which unconscious lives affect behaviour. And the artist can represent the counterpoint to the rational and analytic tendencies of the doctor figure. And artists are expected to behave badly - as with Walter in Trauma, an extremely untrustworthy man. So I'm trying to write a novel at the moment, and not . . . hmm. I don't know what to do, actually. It's a problem I'm struggling with at the moment. Not to write about artists and doctors. It's a predicament."
When he's writing, which is he - the driven artist or the analytic shrink? "Probably a combination of the two," he says. "You are, on the one hand, facing a blank canvas as the painter does. Relying on imagination and intuition. And on the other hand, you're very precise and fastidious about who your characters are, and why they behave as they do. I think the two come together in the act of writing fiction." He doesn't come unravelled, then, as his characters tend to?
"The only unravelling is the familiar experience of panicked despair when you realise that the work just isn't going anywhere," he says. "You're moving forward in a rather blinkered manner for a month or two; you've got a big stack of pages; then comes the day you look through them to see whether anything worthwhile has been written as you're barrelling forward. And with panic and despair you see that you've been going down a blind alley. The job then becomes to see whether there's anything you can pluck out and use to start again; and push the thing in a different direction."
It's quite something to hear McGrath speak about his work in this way. To read his prose is to have an impression of effortless control and panther-like grace. Paragraphs stalk the reader sentence by sentence, then spring for the kill. Characters are so uncannily plausible you feel as if you really know them - until the story twists, and you realise you really, really didn't. Interestingly, although two of the books have been filmed - Spiderin 2002 and Asylumin 2005 - neither movie was a huge critical success.
Perhaps, in the end, McGrath's milieu is an inescapably literary one. Certainly he admits to being an insatiable real-life reader. "I have a lot of books," he says. "I have a wall of books and I have a ladder to get to the high shelves. It runs along a bar. It's a great thing. I'm very proud of it. And my research - such as it is - is always by means of reading, often in a very random fashion, allowing serendipity to give me what I need."
While researching Traumahe came upon just such a book - Robin J Lifton's Home From the War. Lifton was one of the first psychiatrists to diagnose what was later called "traumatic shock syndrome", and to set up therapy groups in which ex-servicemen could talk, in a safe environment, about what had happened to them. In the book, the narrator's mentor, Sam Pike, performs a similar function. It marks a vast improvement on society's response to soldiers who returned, "shell-shocked", from the first World War.
Nevertheless, Traumamakes the point that the psychological damage inflicted by war isn't confined to military personnel; it affects everyone who lives in so-called "civilised" society. The obvious implication, moreover, is that it's happening all over again; the same crippling emotional ripples are once more spreading outwards from soldiers who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. "This time, people are much more alert to the trauma," says McGrath. "Certainly, the New York Timeshas been attending to this aspect of the Iraq war very, very closely over the last three or four years."
McGrath has no doubts about how America can make a start on healing this - and indeed its many and various - traumas. "A young, dynamic black man as president," he declares. "The message that will send to the world is bound to be a rejection of what the last eight years have been about. In New York, there has been a sense of shame, of some bewilderment - of paralysis, almost. We watched as the Bush administration took advantage of the feelings aroused by 9/11 and exploited them shamelessly - tied Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, lied and deceived and overturned civil rights without any restraint and took the law into their own hands. And there was no critical reaction from the American people. It was as if the country had frozen up and become docile and unquestioning. That has been the biggest shock of all."
McGrath threw a party after each of the last two presidential elections, and will be throwing one again this time - whatever happens. "It was terrible to see one's friends shuffling out into the night with their heads bowed. It was horrible to see it happening again." He shakes his head. Then he beams. You never know. It could be a great night in November in New York.
• Traumais published by Bloomsbury, £14.99. Patrick McGrath will be reading from the book at the Kilkenny Festival on Wednesday, August 13th