LAST DAYS IN CLEAVER SQUARE
‘It’s not until you read a novel by Patrick Mcgrath you remember how boring most books are’ was the opening sentence of John Self’s review in the Times. Mcgrath’s tenth novel is a ‘passionate, tempest-tossed memoir by Francis Mcnulty – a poet
‘Mcgrath is unfailingly deft in his handling of trauma and deceit’
nearing the end of his life in London in 1975 – made up of equal parts what he’s telling us and what he isn’t. He tells us of an apparition who visits him, in the form of General Franco – himself dying – that recalls to Francis his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War,’ explained Self. James Walton in the Spectator thought: ‘Mcgrath’s prose is as unshowily affecting as ever and Francis himself a memorable portrait of raging against the dying of the light that never lets us forget how inexorably the light dies anyway.’ But he thought the novel, though not a long one, could have been ‘considerably shorter’.
In the Guardian, Nicholas Wroe wrote: ‘Mcgrath expertly deploys some of his trademark elements, as with the double-edged naming of Cleaver Square… and is unfailingly deft in his handling of trauma and deceit… By its conclusion, Last Days
in Cleaver Square manages to pull off the impressive trick of being narratively coherent and satisfying, yet still true to the messy businesses of memory, ageing, guilt and how to tell the story of a life.’
‘And for all the brilliant comic touches,’ thought Miranda Green in the FT, ‘Catholicism weighs heavily on this novel, injecting it with the torment of a soul unshriven: Mcnulty muses on his need for absolution as he recounts his Spanish adventures to a young journalist come to flirt and cajole a story out of him.’