Dr. Haggard's Disease (Vintage Contemporaries)

Rating:
Summary: Unusual point of view
Review: Dr. Haggard's Disease is intriguing because of the way it's written: the protagonist addresses another character in the story.
But there isn't a whole lot of plot. Dr. Haggard falls in love with his pathologist's wife, Fanny. She dumps him. There's an assault; Dr. Haggard falls down a stairs, breaking his hip. Throughout the book, he refers to this ailment as Spike. He takes morphine, tries to kick it, can't. He's fired after the "accident" and goes to live in the south of England at a house called Elgin, where he treats a retirement community. But then Fanny's son, a WWII Spitfire pilot comes to see him. He's found out about his mother's affair and wants to know more about Haggard. That's when the book really really gets strange. Haggerd turns his obsession on James and we're wondering whether Haggerd's disease is his obsession with Fanny or insanity. James finally shuns the doctor, worried that there may be some homosexual interest. But that's not the doctor's take. He's worried the boy may have a disease, a disease that will remind you of THE CRYING GAME. Of course, we're not sure what's happening to James is really occurring because of the unreliability of the narrator. I read the novel because I wanted to see how McGrath handled the unusual point of view, but I wouldn't recommend it for the beach.

Rating:
Summary: Plot is a little thin, but mood galore
Review: I have read most of Patrick McGrath's novels, and I enjoyed Dr. Haggard's Disease as much as any of them. McGrath again explores the depths of obsession, and like most of his books you get the story from a somewhat unreliable narrator, who borders on mental illness. This book is set in England in the 1930's, with ominous storm clouds of war starting to form. Edward Haggard is an aspiring surgeon, and after a glance at a cocktail party he begins a passionate affair with Fanny, a colleague's wife.

The affair seems doomed from the outset, as the story is being narrated by Haggard years later at his sea-side house to Fanny's son, a young RAF fighter pilot hungry for details about his mother. Haggard frequently tells us that "Spike" is acting up or making noise, and only later do we learn that Spike is the name given to the metal rod holding together Haggard's shattered hip.

The plot of the novel is fairly uneventful, and I won't give away too many details, but suffice to say the story is an exploration of obsession. Haggard, the narrator, is a literally broken man by the end, his once-promising career in ruins, tormented by his love for another's wife and haunted by the memory of his affair as he spills his heart out to her young adult son. The ending of the novel, as many have observed, was astounding. It took my breath away and had me re-reading the page several times.

Like all McGrath books, the settings are a large and effective component of the story. The author made the dreary, run-down manor house come alive in The Grotesque, and in Martha Peake the British moors and the wild New England colonies provided a perfect setting for the tale. Dr. Haggard's Disease is no exception, here you can hear and smell the surf crashing against the rocks, and the wind whipping through Haggard's drafty house as our narrator sits by the window, watching the RAF pilots taking off to battle the Luftwaffe. If you are a newcomer to the fiction of McGrath, I think this book would be a good place to start.

Rating:
Summary: OBSESSION AND PASSION, GOTHIC STYLE
Review: McGrath is an excellent writer - as a purveyor of 'modern gothic' he has few peers. I have to agree with another reviewer that this is not his best work - SPIDER is amazing, and ASYLUM and THE GROTESQUE both rise to heights not matched here - but it has many good points, and is definitely head and shoulders above much of the gothic literature on the market today.

The story is set at the beginning of the Second World War, and is told by Dr. Edward Haggard to the adult son of a woman with which the doctor had an ill-fated affair - but rather than being told in words, it plays itself out in an instant, in the minds of the narrator. Dr. Haggard sees himself as a grotesque character - his head is large, out of proportion to his body size, with a shock of wild, unkempt hair; he walks with a limp and a stick, as a result of a hip injury sustained at the hands of his lover's husband, a fellow doctor; he has become addicted to morphine in attempting to quell the recurring pain from this injury; and since the ending of the affair, he is prone to depression and melancholy, which are not helped by his choice of a new abode: a foreboding house perched atop a cliff on the southeastern coast of England, in a small town that will bear the brunt of a German invasion, if one should come.

Throughout the story we hear Haggard attempt to reconcile the deep love and passion he experienced during the course of his affair with the pain and separation he feels after its inevitable end. He ruminates at length on his beliefs on the nature of love, of passion, of life itself. When a young British airman comes to his door, and turns out to be the son of the woman with whom he remains obsessed, he sees the young man's mother reborn, and quickly becomes obsessed with him. This obsession, as it turns out, has a physiological and medical basis, as well as an emotional one.

The story is a dark one - and fans of McGrath's fine writing should expect nothing else - but it has many bright moments. Many of Dr. Haggard's ideas and views on the nature of love and passion are moving, and will most likely resonate within many readers, coming close to things that they feel themselves. The story is an unusual take on the 'depression after and affair gone wrong' motif, and in the hands of McGrath, it is a memorable piece of writing - moving and disturbing at the same time.