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A review by jatridle
Dr. Haggard's Disease by Patrick McGrath
3.0
I always end up glad that I've stuck with Patrick McGrath's books to the end. I seem to enjoy thinking about them after I'm finished more than I enjoyed reading them in the first place. Like with Asylum, fighting through the first two-thirds of this novel was a struggle for me. The narrative, for the most part, focused on a romance that frankly didn't interest me all that much. Reading it often made me feel like I was stuck on a long bus ride next to a love-sick, self-absorbed bore who seems to think his love affair with this woman was infinitely more fascinating than any affair anyone else has ever had in the history of love affairs. And it just wasn't. (I get it. The dude was obsessed. It was the whole point of the book. His passion for her was his "disease." Yada, yada, yada. For my own sanity's sake, though, I'm glad there wasn't any more of it.) Throw in the fact that, at least in his head, he was narrating this tale to the son of the woman he'd had the illicit affair with added a fairly big yuck factor for me at times. Though it was a yuck factor I enjoyed.
Anyway, I stuck with this book because I know McGrath likes to play with perspective. His narrators tend to be unreliable and at least a bit off their rocker-- leaving the reader to grapple with just how unreliable and how off their rocker they are. I'm not going to go into too much detail here. I don't want to give away too much. But, as I was with the other two Patrick McGrath books I've read (Spider and Asylum), by the end of this one, I was impressed.
Also, as with Asylum, I enjoyed the sort of homage he played to the classic Gothic setting with Elgin--the gigantic old house on the edge of a crumbling seaside cliff inhabited only by a crippled, morphine-addicted doctor and his housemaid. Sometimes the waves crashed violently against the shore. Sometimes wind howled through the house's empty old rooms, rattling windows and knocking out panes of glass. It was a nice touch.
Anyway, I stuck with this book because I know McGrath likes to play with perspective. His narrators tend to be unreliable and at least a bit off their rocker-- leaving the reader to grapple with just how unreliable and how off their rocker they are. I'm not going to go into too much detail here. I don't want to give away too much. But, as I was with the other two Patrick McGrath books I've read (Spider and Asylum), by the end of this one, I was impressed.
Also, as with Asylum, I enjoyed the sort of homage he played to the classic Gothic setting with Elgin--the gigantic old house on the edge of a crumbling seaside cliff inhabited only by a crippled, morphine-addicted doctor and his housemaid. Sometimes the waves crashed violently against the shore. Sometimes wind howled through the house's empty old rooms, rattling windows and knocking out panes of glass. It was a nice touch.