The Painting of the Urban Dreamscape in Patrick McGrath’s Port Mungo

“Black is the silence of the body after death, the close of life” (Wassily Kandisky, 1911) In Patrick McGrath’s latest novel, Port Mungo, the artist’s journey through various urban landscapes definitely gives shape to the maturing textual dreamscape that characterizes McGrath’s fiction. In his first novel, The Grotesque, he explored the “Gothicism” of the English countryside, then dug into ideas of the London urban landscape as a reflective setting for his characters’ madness, in Spider and A...