Spider Book

I've always found it odd that I can recall incidents from my boyhood with clarity and precision begins Dennis Cleg, the protagonist and narrator of Spider, and yet events that happened yesterday are blurred, and I have no confidence in my ability to remember them accurately at all. Dennis writes down the story of his life in a notebook, having recently returned to London after spending 20 years in Canada, which he refuses to talk about, and is staying at a boarding house in the London's East End - not very far away from where his childhood home was, and where a terrible tragedy struck his family many years ago.

With Spider, Patrick McGrath has crafted a bona-fide contemporary Gothic novel, complete with all the major themes of the genre - a frame narrative of love, betrayal and murder, obsession, isolation and slow descent into the uncertain and madness. As Dennis tries to reconstruct his childhood, he finds himself increasingly unable to draw the distinction between the real and imagined. The boarding house at which he stays in is run by a Ms. Wilkinson, which shares the same name with a woman his father had an affair - and which he blames for destroying the already very troubled marriage of his parents, and taking place of his mother. He writes that he is troubled by other tenants, though he never seems to see them - yet they bother him by making noise and disturbing his writing in the journal, which he hides from all eyes - in the drawer, under the floor, up in the unused chimney.

Where Spider truly excels is the atmosphere - McGrath does a terrific job with not only capturing the voice of a troubled, confused narrator, but also the foggy, dominating industrial landscape of the 1950's London. You can almost choke on the smoke and fog, and feel the soot and dust settle on every part of your body, as the narrator takes you on his journey through the narrow streets, alleyways and canals, surrounded by small houses, factories and pubs, all of them filled with unhappy people. The city is covered by the Great Smog, but so is Spider's mental state, which slowly disintegrates along with his story. I suspect that something very wrong is happening inside me, he writes, that it's not the food at all (filthy though it is), but that something far worse is involved.

The novel has been adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, with Ralph Fiennes portraying Dennis - I haven't seen it, but I'm interested in how Cronenberg could convey an intimate first person narration via film., and how well has he captured the setting so well described by McGrath in his book.