Martha Peake (56 page)

But before I slip into a restless doze, which is all I know of sleep these days, I gaze at the painting of Martha which hung once on her father’s wall, and now is mine. And I see again those proud features, executed in the manner of a northern master, with
terra rossa
for the half-tones, and the underpainting in white lead—and her hair, of course, her glorious red hair—and I imagine her in this very room, her heart in a tumult of dread, and grief, and rage, and determination, as she prepares to take ship for America, and there meet her destiny.

It is all I have left of her. And so I haunt the chambers and passages of Drogo Hall, counting the days until I can sink into darkness with the others. And if Harry’s spirit still wanders the Lambeth Marsh, as I believe it does, for I hear him at times when the wind is up, and the rain hammers at the windows, and the wild dogs howl—then I know that Martha rises from the Old Burying Ground, and ascends the great headlands of the cape, whence her spirit flies out to him across the North Atlantic, and they are, at last, and forever, as one—ha!

READING GROUP GUIDE

1.
Martha Peake
is constructed as a story within a story, presented by a narrator who weaves his own imaginings into a tale told by his uncle. How does this narrative device influence the reader’s impressions of the characters and the facts of the story as they unfold? Did you find yourself accepting Ambrose Tree’s interpretations of events, even though he openly acknowledges his use of conjecture to fill in the gaps in his uncle’s narrative?

2. William describes Harry as “one of those cursed few to whom Nature in her folly gave the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet” [
this page
]. How does Harry’s childhood contribute to his divided nature? Are both elements of his character essential to his survival in London?

3. Harry sees showing off his backbone as “a spiritual labour, a kind of penance. To humiliate himself before the crowd was to invite the contempt and disgust he felt he deserved. For he wanted to cauterize his soul” [
this page
]. Does his decision to write poetry show that he is ready to move on with his life? What motivates him to recite his poem to an audience?

4. How do the themes of the “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian”—at once “a story of tyranny” and “a vision of untamed Nature” [
this page
]—reflect Harry’s personal struggles? Is Harry, trapped by his physical condition and tormented by his moral failings, symbolic of England at the time? At the same time, how does he also embody the spirit of the American colonists and their outrage against the tyranny of the king?

5. Do the encounters between Harry and Lord Drogo support Ambrose’s theory that the doctor’s intentions are sinister? What do they reveal about English society in the eighteenth century and the values that shaped it? How does Ambrose’s description of Harry’s appearance in Lord Drogo’s Theatre of Anatomy [
this page
] reflect his own bias, as well as the prevailing sensibilities of his time?

6. The world still knew him for a monster. However fresh the springs of the spirit within him, this could not be overcome, for this, his body, in the eyes of the world was his nature; and glimpsing this, in his bitterness, and spite, he had jettisoned his humanity and embraced the monster” [
this page
]. Is this an adequate explanation of Harry’s deterioration? Is Harry’s outward appearance a mirror of his corruption or the cause of his decline?

7. What qualities does Martha display, even as a young child, that foreshadow her future role in America? In what ways does the relationship between her and her father symbolize the relationship between the colonies and England? What political message is at the heart of the final, violent scene between Harry and Martha [
this page
]?

8. How do you feel about Martha’s decision to marry Adam Rind? Is her deception justifiable? How do you think Adam and his father, Silas, would have reacted had Martha told them the truth about her situation when she first arrived?

9. After her baby is born Martha remarks, “None of the women had asked to hold him, but the Rind girls were eager to … Martha wondered why the women had behaved so strangely. Did they think the child bewitched?” [
this page
] Are children in general more willing to accept the unusual than adults are, and if so, why? What insight does the novel offer into why people are uncomfortable with those who are disabled or otherwise different?

10. In what ways does little Harry’s deformed back symbolize the challenges facing the new nation of America? How do the various reactions to Harry’s birth—from Martha’s own feelings to those of the family and neighbors—embody the philosophical and political differences between America and England?

11. In response to the rumors that Martha spied for the British, Silas Rind “put his considerable authority behind an effort to promote a different version of the story, one in which Martha played not the traitor but the patriot; and no ordinary patriot at that. Martha Peake, he made it known, was a heroine, and a martyr to the cause” [
this page
]. Do you agree with his actions? Is it legitimate to mislead people in order to further a cause?

12. The British officer, Giles Hawkins, also uses Martha in pursuit of political and military ends, lying about her father in order to get information about American preparations for battle [
this page
]. Is there a moral difference between Silas’s creation of a myth and Hawkins’s more direct trickery?

13. From Harry’s career as a smuggler to Martha’s role in the Revolutionary War,
Martha Peake
is filled with evasion, secrecy, and deception. How does the way the story is presented echo and/or enhance these elements?

14. Does the ending surprise you? Like his uncle, Ambrose withholds information over the course of the narrative. What examples are there of his deliberately obscuring facts about Harry and his relationship to the denizens of Drogo Hall? In what ways does Ambrose’s nightmarish experience in the cellar [
this page
] serve as a metaphor for his role as storyteller? How does the ultimate revelation about Harry’s fate relate to the opening line of the book: “It is a black art, the writing of a history, is it not?”

15. Are McGrath’s portraits of Harry and Martha equally effective? Does one character hold your attention or engage your sympathy more fully than the other? Would you describe Harry as an evil, immoral person, or does he evoke compassion? What flaws, if any, does Martha exhibit? What do you admire most about her?

16. The first half of
Martha Peake
takes place in London, and during her stay in America Martha witnesses only the early days of the Revolutionary War. Do you think the book’s subtitle—“A Novel of the American Revolution”—is appropriate? What might have been McGrath’s reasons for selecting it?

17. Does the book deepen your understanding of the causes of the Revolution? In addition to his vivid description of the setting, how does McGrath illuminate the historical realities and the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the times? Are there any historical omissions made by the author?

18. What does a historical novel provide which is missing from works of history or biography? What does McGrath achieve by presenting the Peakes’ story in the guise of a dark and at times melodramatic Gothic novel rather than as a straight narrative, a diary, or another traditional form of historical fiction? What specific characteristics of a Gothic novel make it an especially suitable medium for historical fiction?

19. The technique of framing a narrative was common in nineteenth-century literature, used for example, in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1817) and Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1847). In what other ways does the novel evoke the literary conventions of nineteenth-century fiction?

20. If you have read the novels of Charles Dickens, discuss the stylistic and thematic parallels between Martha Peake and books such as
Oliver Twist
,
Great Expectations
, and
Bleak House
. As a modern novelist, McGrath is much farther removed from the events in Harry and Martha’s lives and from the narrator’s own time than Dickens was. How does McGrath’s contemporary point of view influence the way he portrays both characters and events?

PATRICK M
C
GRATH

Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.

Books by Patrick McGrath

Blood and Water and Other Tales

The Grotesque

Spider

Dr. Haggard’s Disease

Asylum

Martha Peake

Port Mungo

Trauma

ALSO BY
P
ATRICK
M
C
G
RATH

ASYLUM

In the summer of 1959, Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting—a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella’s knowledge of Edgar’s crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues—a passion that will consume Stella’s sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

Fiction/978-0-679-78138-7

DR. HAGGARD’S DISEASE

The setting is a cliffside manor on the English coast in the early years of the Second World War. The narrator is Dr. Edward Haggard, a mysteriously wounded figure racked by morphine addiction and tormented by the memories of his intense affair with Fanny, the wife of his former chief pathologist. Fanny is dead, but when her son, a young fighter pilot, appears in Dr. Haggard’s life, the aging doctor finds out how an old passion can turn into a strange—and dangerous—obsession.

Fiction/978-0-679-75261-5

THE GROTESQUE

Something is rotten at Crook, the decaying English manor house that is the setting for Patrick McGrath’s exuberantly spooky novel. Fledge, the butler, is getting intimate with the mistress. Fledge’s wife is getting intimate with the claret. Sidney Giblet, the master’s prospective son-in-law, has disappeared. And the master himself—the one-time gentleman naturalist Sir Hugo Coal—is watching it all in a state of helpless fury, since he is paralyzed in a wheelchair, unable to move or speak.

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MARTHA PEAKE

When Ambrose Tree is summoned by his ancient uncle to the brooding mansion Drogo Hall, he suspects it’s to hear the old man’s dying words and then collect a sizable inheritance. He has no idea he is about to learn the bizarre story of Harry Peake, Cornish smuggler turned poet who became a monster capable of the most horrifying acts. Or that he’s about to become psychologically enmeshed in the riveting life of Harry’s daughter, Martha, who flees her father for colonial America where she becomes a heroic figure in the revolution against England.

Fiction/978-0-375-70131-3

PORT MUNGO

In a seedy river town on the Gulf of Honduras, Jack Rathbone believed he had found a place that would give him and his lover, the accomplished artist Vera Savage, the solitude they would need to create a body of work that would shake the art world to its core. But in a place where time lies thicker than the mangrove swamps that surround it, Jack and Vera discover an emotional frontier more fearsome, untamed, and dangerous than any wilderness.

Fiction/978-1-4000-7548-5

SPIDER

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles,
Spider
is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.

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TRAUMA

Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people’s demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York. Yet he hasn’t found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him, condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger. Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss.