Dr. Haggard's Disease (Hardcover)

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.

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.

Like Spider, the narrator of this book is the main character (Dr. Haggard). One is immediately absorbed by the persona of Dr. Haggard - a rather pathetic individual. His obsession of lost love is so painfully moving that it almosts hurts to read it. Anyone who has had difficulty getting over a relationship, or knows of anyone who has remained broken-hearted to an extreme extent would relate very well to Dr. Haggard. This is wonderful literature.

Of course being a writer of gothic novels, Dr. Haggard's Disease slowly takes on an unusual twist (which I won't reveal). But it really is just a natural progression of Dr. Haggard's "disease".

While relatively easy to read, I wouldn't recommend this novel to teenagers. The subject matter is too somber, too intense. For all others, buy this book ... ok? You won't regret it.