Down I’d go to sniff around the boats moored there, old battered working boats with smelly tarpaulins spread across their decks, all puddled with rainwater and green with fungus. You reached the strand at low tide by a set of tarry wooden steps beside an old pub called the Crispin. I went down to the river, to a pebbly strand where as a boy I used to watch the barges and steamers in those days they ran on coal, and constantly coughed cloudy spumes of black smoke into the sky. He now resides in a half-way house not far from where he grew up in the East End, shortly before the Second World War. He spends his days wandering once-familiar streets and canal ways trying to adjust to a new life outside of the psychiatric hospital from which he’s recently been released. The Spider of the title is Dennis Cleg, a troubled man who has returned to London from Canada, where he has been living for the past 20 years. Both books are about mental illness, but McGrath’s is written in a more eloquent, old-fashioned, literary style, and left a far deeper impression on me. I don’t say this lightly, but it’s perhaps the best book I’ve read all year. I read Patrick McGrath‘s Spider - first published in 1990 - back-to-back with Nathan Filer’s Shock of the Fall. Fiction – paperback Penguin 221 pages 1992.
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