Patrick McGrath - Dr. Haggard's Disease Patrick McGrath Dr. Haggard's Disease Small towns and villages are rife with gossip.
People know everyone else and rumours spread like wildfire.
People's lives are turned into small dramas, played out on the stage of peer disapproval. McGrath often seems to work on this stage, taking a story that could be told within minutes by the sharp tongued village gossip, and exploring it through the length of a novel. Though where gossip is told through a network of those outside the tiny scandal, McGrath places you right in the middle. In Dr. Haggard's Disease the narrator is wrapped up totally in the story he is telling, one told solely from his perspective. That of a junior doctor who had an affair with an older woman during the years leading up to the second world war.