Stepping Into the Democracy Dream

Imagine a time when democracy was a dream and its only enemy wore red. Imagine that the obstacle to that dream was an ocean to cross and the price a war more welcome than feared. Imagine a country that was less a place than a possibility. Imagine stepping from darkness into light, as Thomas Paine once encouraged us:

“O! ye that love mankind--stand forth!” It was 1776 when he penned this exhortation.

“Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression,” he wrote. “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Paine’s siren call, printed in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” is said to have lured its share of asylum-seekers to these distant shores and galvanized many a doubting patriot. But what if, Patrick McGrath wonders in his novel “Martha Peake,” what if they weren’t enough--those fiery words, that righteous ire--to turn the odds at Concord and Trenton, Saratoga and Yorktown?

What if--he teases us--we needed something more, something more for our hearts and less for our minds. “It is a black art, the writing of history,” he tells us and begins by conjuring one William Tree, aged bachelor and caretaker of the estate of the late anatomist Francis Drogo. Tree has summoned his nephew, Ambrose, to his side, where the tale of Martha, recently dead, and her troubled father, Harry Peake, begins.

Harry, we learn, was a fisherman who cast his nets along the Cornwall coast. Smuggling was a side to which he fell, and it proved to be his undoing. In a house fire, fueled by barrels of contraband rum, he loses his wife and breaks his back, tragedies that leave him forever marked and bereaving. Driven from memories of happier times, he exiles himself to London accompanied by Martha, the only child who isn’t repulsed by his poorly doctored, ill-repaired spine.

All this sounds a little macabre, and it is. If it weren’t for the political impulse running through these pages, “Martha Peake” would be another gothic outing for McGrath, whose has made his reputation on the grotesque and darkly bizarre. Once Harry and Martha are established in London, a city riddled with disease, crime and squalor, McGrath broadens his story into a Blakean portrait of a people whose faces are marked with weakness and woe and of England, less a country than a relic.

Harry parlays his deformity and a talent for verse into a poetic sideshow, performing a thinly masked ballad about liberty, taxation and Empire, and Martha begins her own political education, wondering at an early age “why the people they lived among could barely afford the staples of life, while others had so much.”

Corruption is, of course, the broad answer, and Harry dreams of the day when they might “escape . . . the evil inherent in man’s nature” to a place where “the natural virtuous man within could stand forth. That place, that great good place, he called America.”

But, alas, demon alcohol poisons Harry’s dream. A victim of his poverty and his crippled gait, he grows cruel and abusive. Martha flees his violence; America becomes her asylum. Arriving in 1774, she finds a land alive with the sound of hammers and saws and “none of the idleness and debauchery that so disfigures the English countryside.”

The dream is contagious, as William and Ambrose attest, spinning this yarn from their decrepit London manse. Living with an aunt and uncle, Martha falls in love, marries a cousin and is swept up in the revolutionary fervor of the time.

“The idea of liberty may have arisen in England,” she argues, “but there it had withered on the branch because the English continued to bow the head and kiss the boot of men whose power and wealth came of the accident of birth, no more than that. As if a man’s value, his virtue, his character could be inherited from his father and not earned!”

It’s a sentiment worthy of Paine himself, who makes a cameo toward the end of the novel, but Martha, not content with words alone, takes it one step further. Driven by injustice, tormented by the memories of the pain she saw within her father’s heart, she picks up a musket and fires a shot that earns her a place in history.

What Thomas Paine is in the minds of the revolutionaries, she soon is in their hearts: It is said, McGrath tells us, that an engraving of her kept the soldiers of the Continental Army alive in their darkest moments of doubt.

Poor satanic England! It could never stand up against the prophecy of America nor the impassioned writing and imaginative re-creations of McGrath, who in this twisted story marries both heaven and hell. Dreams, like Thomas Paine’s--and Martha Peake’s--soon set fires in Europe and fed many a republican heart.