Well, it’s Halloween season again, so I thought it appropriate to review a book set on a stormy cliffside manor, wherein an articulate but troubled mind seeks to heal itself from love lost once because the woman was married and twice because the woman died.  This is Doctor Edward Haggard, who lives in this manor because really he just wants to get away from everything.  The town is small, filled with the aged, but World War II is raging across the channel and not too far away fighter pilots take off for battle, only a few of them returning.  The book begins with this very curious opening paragraph:

I was in Elgin, upstairs in my study, gazing at the sea and reflecting, I remember, on a line of Goethe when Mrs. Gregor tapped at the door that Saturday and said there was a young man to see me in the surgery, a pilot.  You know how she talks.  “A pilot, Mrs. Gregor?”  I murmured.  I hate being disturbed on my Saturday afternoons, especially if Spike is playing up, as he was that day, but of course I limped out onto the landing and made my way downstairs.  And you know what that looks like — pathetic bloody display that is, first the good leg, then the bad leg, then the stick, good leg, bad leg, stick, but down I came down the stairs, old beyond my years and my skin a gray so cachetic it must have suggested even to you that 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 –

Sure, this opening paragraph suggests a turbulent past — there’s the cane and bad leg (Spike) — but to whom is Dr. Haggard talking?  What pain has the “dear boy” suffered?  And why does the opening paragraph trail off in such a strange way?  McGrath is meticulous when setting up his stories.  It is important to know — and we know soon — that the story the narrator is telling is nice, but perhaps more important is the method.  Dr. Haggard’s mind is lucid enough to keep up appearances, but so deeply has Haggard delved into his suffering that it and its source cannot help but cast a shadow over everything.

We learn very quickly that “you” is the young pilot James, the son of his lost lover, Fanny.  We also learn fairly soon that Haggard and Fanny met (at a funeral) in October 1937, which isn’t really that long ago — James was already sixteen at that point — but in the short time a love affair reached its peak temperature (from which Haggard hasn’t cooled down), the lover retreated and then died, and Haggard has retreated to the sea.  And already Haggard is telling young James not only about how Haggard and Fanny met but (back to that strange first paragraph) how he and James met.  What is going on here?  What has brought about this telling?  Why does James care about Haggard?

And just what, while we’re asking, has compelled Haggard to be so explicit about how much he’s suffered since the love affair ended?

I knew now there’d be no easy relief from the pain aroused from within, the pain I’d foolishly thought almost extinct. [ . . . ] [T]ime, I’d thought, would lay these inner ghosts,  and surely, to have left the city where the affair had taken place, surely this must help the process of time, help begin to heal the rawest of the wounds, ease the more ferocious, the more savage and implacable of the hurts I had sustained?  But no, apparently not.  Apparently I was not yet to enjoy the luxury of a simple melancholy, not yet to know resignation, and the ability to recall the loved one’s memory with tenderness rather than pain. [ . . . ] It occured to me that I couldn’t simply wait for time to heal me, I would have to set about deliberately healing myself, for it was absurd to be the slave of feeling.  Feeling, I told myself, is only one facet or dimension of experience, and by what law must it predominate over the rest.

A fantastic paragraph.  McGrath knows how to write about love of the torturing variety: “I was not yet to enjoy the luxury of a simple melancholy” — fantastic.  Furthermore, it is obvious that, whatever Haggard has done to heal himself, it hasn’t worked.

The story — a dramatic monologue in prose form, which became more and more disturbing as it progresses (reminding me of the poem “My Last Dutchess”) — takes us in and out of the love affair, to the conflict between Haggard and Fanny’s husband, who happens to be the chief pathologist at Haggard’s old hospital, and finally to the strange relationship Haggard has with James.  It’s a haunting tale, made all the better by the great voice McGrath has given Haggard: sophisticated, broken, tempestuous.  If you’re looking to spend some time with the unsavory this Halloween season, step right up and meet Doctor Edward Haggard.  You won’t like him and you won’t like what he has to say, but you’ll love how the tale is told and the shivers it will summon.

A few weeks ago when I realized that October was just around the corner (I’m always behind on this stuff these days), I decided to look for a good literary creepy book with loads of atmosphere.  Hence, my venture to Patrick McGrath.  Here’s yet another well known author who is new to me.  Thanks to John Self’s blog – yes, “Asylum” – I am now an initiate to this “gothic” author.  So here is a bit of an homage to you, John.  It’s because of your blog I chose this particular author – one of your favorites, I see – and this particular title as my first.

I have to be honest: at first I wasn’t sure I picked out the right book for me, let alone the right book to suit my mood.  At first it felt a bit too – oh, I don’t know - focused on unruly passionate romance.  That unsatisfied feeling didn’t last too long, though.  Quickly, I saw that the development of the love affair was not nearly as important as its psychological repurcussions.  And McGrath does an excellent job creating tension through the psyche. 

Though as I said the first couple dozen pages didn’t work for me, the first paragraph really grabbed me as it explained quite a bit of what was to come:

The catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession has been a professional interest of mine for many years now.  Such relationships vary widely in duration and intensity but tend to pass through the same stages.  Recognition.  Identification.  Assignation.  Structure.  Complication.  And so on.  Stella Raphael’s story is one of the saddest I know.  A deeply frustrated woman, she suffered the predictable consequences of a long denial collapsing in the face of sudden overwhelming temptation.  And she was a romantic.  She translated her experience with Edgar Stark into the stuff of melodrama, she made of it a tale of outcast lovers braving the world’s contempt for the sake of a great passion.  Four lives were destroyed in the process, but whatever remorse she may have felt she clung to her illusions to the end.  I tried to help but she deflected me from the truth until it was too late.  She had to.  She couldn’t afford to let me see it clearly, it would have been the ruin of the few flimsy psychic structures she had left.

Here we meet our narrator, Peter Cleave, a psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane.  Stella is the wife to the newly staffed forensic psychiatrist, the ambitious Max Rapheal.  Edgar Stark, Stella’s lover, happens to be one of Peter Cleave’s patients, an artist who, after developing jealous delusions, killed his wife and then mutilated her head. 

Even though Stella knows a bit about Edgar’s past, she is incredibly attracted to him as he works to fix up their conservatory.  She simply cannot believe that he’s as dangerous as they say, and in fact she doesn’t believe he should be locked up at all.  This is all background, though, and something we can basically get from that first paragraph.

Once the love affair develops, however, the book immerses itself into Stella’s psyche as she navigates through her relationships with Edgar and Max and Doctor Cleave.  Here, for example, is an encounter Stella has with Max soon after the love affair is off the ground.

Behind him on the far side of the drive the pines rose in a dark mass against the evening sky.  She embraced him with a warmth unusual for her, and as she did so an ironic thought sprang into her mind, that it’s the guilt of the adulterous woman that drives her into her husband’s arms.

“Hello,” he said as she clung to him like a woman adrift, a woman drowning, “what’s all this?”

She moved away to the mirror over the empty fireplace and patted at her hair, and tried to find some sign of sin on her face.

“Nothing.  I missed you today, that’s all.”

“Why did you miss me?”

She turned to face him.  There was real curiosity in his voice, and she felt the psychiatrist in the man, or rather, the man receded and the psychiatrist emerged as the wheels turned and she saw him examine this fragment of her psychic life and fish around for its meaning.  In that moment he became her enemy.  She knew then that any openness between them was dangerous, and that her explosive secret must be hidden with especial skill from the eyes of this sudden stranger with his desperately acute powers of mental intrusion and perception.

Thankfully for me, the book continues in this vain, focusing mainly on internal elements rather than on the love affair.  And McGrath has some other interesting components to the story.  It doesn’t take long before we can start wondering how Peter Cleave knows as much about the love affair as he does.  And soon after we can begin questioning how he fits into this mix.  Though his language is most of the time clinically detached, we can discern that that is one of his own devices for covering his feelings.

Bolstering the narrative are a number of gothic elements – the architecture, a conservatory, the garden, the sea, the torrential love – but none of them feel cliched or out of place for the story.  In other words, while this has gothic elements, I wouldn’t say it’s a “gothic” book.  That would, in my opinion, place it in a restricting category.  It’s much more than that.

So I’m happy with my first foray into McGrath’s land.  I’m sad to report, however, that it wasn’t quite as moody and disturbing in a creepy, haunting way as I was hoping.  Any suggestions?