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Dr Haggards Disease
by Patrick McGrath
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Penguin Putnam~childrens Hc (1993-06-05)
ISBN: 0670836850
EAN: 9780670836857
Paperback: 192 pages
SKU: S070532-3503
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Very good overall condition. No writing, very tight binding. Correct ISBN. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Two novels and one short story follows the life of Dr. Edward Haggard as he reflects on the nature of love, death, medicine, and war and his liaisons with a colleague's wife and a wartime lover. 25,000 first printing.
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Customer Reviews
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The Good Old Days Were Not Necessarily Good
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-11-19
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Delving into the inner angst of a newly graduated doctor experiencing a residency in a London hospital, this book focuses on three years of love and turmoil experienced by protagonist Dr. Edward Haggard.
During pre-WW II, Dr. Haggard and others live gayly in the late 1930's. The doctor's emotional bliss though must succumb to harsh realities - much like his British peers whose bliss ends with Hitler's Third Reich. Love and war, a theme not uncommon in any literature during the past three centuries, splendidly shows how the two can contrast and waltz with one another in this short minuet of a novel.
Haggard's love, Frances "Fanny" Vaughan, is the thin attractive wife of Dr. Ratcliff "Ratty" Vaughan, a pudgy unattractive medical formalin-scented pathologist, whose temperament and character are neither loved nor admired. But, amid all of these unpleasantries - Ratty has the girl for reasons never explained other than perhaps his pockets being stuffed with significant salary and his abode being among the finest obtainable for an educated, as opposed to aristocratic, man of that generation.
The British of the 1930's are mainly emotionless and always engaging in satisfying their thirst with an unpopular drink of today - gin. In this maudlin-less society, the affair between Dr. Haggard and Fanny requires furtive actions with scheduled trysts. Stealth meetings are the norm.
The last 30 or 40 pages evolve into wartime England, and life without Fanny. Dr. Haggard meets another Vaughan and some unique, almost bizarre, events unfold.
The writing style of McGrath often explores issues and later delivers facts in regard to the same, making the reader perceive the issue a second time with a more informed mind. With the subsequent revelation of facts, the reader may well change his or her mind about earlier emotions concerning what previously transpired. This writing style cleverly mandates reader review and compels continued contemplation of what was seemingly a "simple" issue.
McGrath is part of the now famous "new gothic" literature. This book though lacks gothic's main characteristics: gothic setting (gloomy manor), villain, a victim, and some form of transgression (cannibalism, necrophilia, murder. . . ). I do not see how this particular work fits into the "new gothic" genre. And, more established pundits of this literature have published internet theses which agree.
In short, if new gothic is what you seek, perhaps this is not your novel. But, then again, this novel can more than satisfy a "new gothic" hunger. And that is why I would recommend this novel to others.
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Different than I expected
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-09-10
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This novel is told by Dr. Haggard and relates his love of and affair with a superior doctor's wife during the 1930's in London and the later aftermath of his life in a small seaside town. The last 30-pages of this novel changed my opinion of the entire book. Although well-written, I saw the first part of the novel as a rehash of an obsession theme reminiscent of The End of the Affair or Lolita. The powerful ending made me completely rethink the entire novel and I found myself refelcting on the book long after I finished it. Well-crafted, disturbing, and deftly executed.
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Obligatory McGrath descent into crazy
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-05-07
A doctor with a bad hip and hella morphia addiction meets the son of the lady he loved and lost years earlier. McGrath is awesome when it comes to delusional demented characters and their descent into insanity. Still not quite sure what happened at the end, but it was freaky.
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A splendid novel
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-12-15
Dr Edward Haggard is a country doctor in England just before the beginning of World War II. He has a practice on the south coast and one day James Vaughan pays him a visit. He is the sun of the most fascinating woman Dr Haggard ever knew. And so the memories of a passionate love affair are resurrected and the reader slowly discovers why Dr Haggard is practicing general medicine in a small forgotten sea resort, now a shattered and broken man in body and spirit.
The novel catches the feel of England in the 1930s; the barely suppressed terror in the face of approaching war. It is also the story of a relationship which goes wrong, a beautiful story impressively told with a restraint which gives the description of the love affair an epic quality. A splendid novel in the same vein as Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.
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Plot is a little thin, but mood galore
Rating (4)
Date: 2003-09-03
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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