required reading

Dr Haggard’s Disease is Patrick McGrath’s third novel, fitting neatly into his repertoire of modern gothic tales, featuring affairs, repression, illness, and unreliable narrators galore.

The eponymous Dr Haggard is appropriately named. He is a doctor in a seaside town on the South coast of England during the Second World War. Living in a rambling house on the clifftops, with a generator in the basement that makes onminous sounds at night, he is addicted to morphine to dull the pain of a broken hip. He roams the house, tormented by this physical pain, and by the memories of a short-lived affair with the Senior Pathologist’s wife. The novel takes the form of his narrative as told to the son of his former lover: James, an RAF pilot who happens to have been stationed in the town and has sought him out. Dr Haggard relives his affair with Fanny through his story, to satisfy James’ curiosity about his mother’s life.

Or rather, Dr Haggard tells us that his story is for James, and he does indeed occasionally direct comments to the boy. These asides leave us with a sinister foreboding about the circumstances of Dr Haggard’s confidences from the very first page:

I was in pain, chronic pain, but oh dear boy not pain like yours, just wait now and we’ll make it all – go – away.

It’s clear, however, that the narrative we’re presented with in the book we are holding is not what James is told, and Dr Haggard himself sometimes makes this explicit:

All this I told you in my study that evening – not in so many words, but I think I gave you the essence of it.

…could I tell you about that revealing disclosure of hers, without alarming you unduly?

What happened next? She came to my room. I was never able to tell you about her coming to my room.

What we are presented with is Dr Haggard’s re-imagining of the history of the affair, through the lens of the story as it was told to James. At many points it is seems unlikely that the narrator could have such precision in his recollection of events long distant, and at other points, he takes upon himself the authority of an omniscient narrator, relating the thoughts of his ex-lover too:

He was fat, and he always smelled of formalin. It was a smell that made her think of pathology labs, and cadavers. He came to her smelling of death, she said, cigars, whisky and death. She went upstairs to her room and sat at her dressing table. She opened a jar of cleansing cream and began gently working it into her skin with the tips of her fingers. She felt calm and sad and now her conscience didn’t trouble her in the slightest.

As the novel continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish what is likely from what is true, and what is supposed from what is certain, as Dr Haggard indulges himself completely in the grief that results from losing his lover. This distortion of reality is really Dr Haggard’s disease, rather than the strange physiological manifestations of bodily imbalances that he fancies might be named after him as the first person to diagnose the condition (if the condition even is present as Dr Haggard supposes it to be). As readers we have an uneasy relationship with the novel we are reading; McGrath does not allow us to easily decode Dr Haggard's narrative, to distinguish in which places he is suffering from an inflated ego or from misremembered facts, leaving us to wonder how the story might exist independent of Dr Haggard's own mind.

The novel is uneasy and faintly threatening throughout- consider the following description of the house that Dr Haggard takes residence in, with its evocations of gothic in the form of the gloomy protagonist and crumbling old house:

I'd bought the house in the autumn of 1938... I was in a very bad way then, as low as I've ever been, stagnant, depressed, in severe physical pain, and it felt to me as though the world were a distorting mirror in which I discovered only my own reflection...

I stood at the end of the drive I remember, the first time I saw it, and gazed in dawning wonder at its steeply gabled roofs, its tall chimneys, its many windows, each one high and narrow, with lancet arches and slender leaded frames. The stone was streaked with salt, and what paint there was was everywhere flaking off to reveal weathered cracking woodwork beneath...

...Elgin stood close to the edge of a cliff that dropped a sheer hundred feet to black rocks and a churning sea.

Black rocks and a churning sea... How many hours have I spent in Elgin dreaming of your mother? Her spirit often seemed more in possession of the house than I was...

I read the entire novel in a state of agitation, as McGrath's writing forces us deeper into Haggard's mind, which is like the unexplored rooms that the doctor roams at night. As the novel progresses, more is revealed to us, but we do not see clearly, as through a window. Instead, the revelations only lead us deeper into Dr Haggard's disease.