Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 25 Feb 2017

Spike Island by Philip Hoare

Philip Hoare’s 2001 book, Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital, is a curious compendium of personal obsessions. On the surface, it is the ‘biography’ of a building – the extraordinary quarter-mile long neo-gothic Royal Victoria Military Hospital which until 1966 stood at Netley on the Southampton coast. Queen Victoria ordered the hospital to be built so as to avoid a repetition of the catastrophe of the Crimean War, when nine times more soldiers died from preventable disease than were killed in action. But the book is also part autobiography, part history of place (Netley itself), part socio-cultural history (the rise of Romanticism, the Gothic in literature, the iconography of Empire and the Victorian preoccupation with death), and part psychogeography.

When I first read it, shortly after the paperback was published, I felt it was these other deeply personal concerns that made the book most appealing. But on rereading, I found that it was precisely these elements which seemed least successful and most intrusive and I found myself longing for a more straightforward history of the hospital itself.

This gargantuan military-medical complex was built to serve an Empire but it grew into a town. During the First World War, Netley’s dedicated railway line delivered tens of thousands of wounded troops from the trenches. During the Second World War the whole complex became a US-controlled citadel. And into the 50s and beyond its shadowy military psychiatric wing continued to function, and was the last part of the hospital to be closed and eventually demolished. RD Laing served there briefly in the 1950s, and the experience was central to the countercultural anti-psychiatry critique that made him famous.

With a subject like this, the book couldn’t fail to be fascinating – but it is also at times infuriatingly over-written.

The author Hoare seems most in thrall to is the great German-born writer WG Sebald, whose unique, meandering, discursive meditations seem constantly but distantly stalked by the Holocaust. Now this criticism may be unfair. Hoare I think states that he read Sebald’s masterpiece The Rings of Saturn only after Spike Island had been published and he had received a letter of fulsome congratulation from Sebald himself. But the fact remains: with its long somewhat ‘mandarin’ sentences and the small, blurry uncaptioned black-and-white pictures scattered throughout, Spike Island even looks like a WG Sebald book. But its prose certainly does not achieve the same apparently effortless grace and assurance that marks Sebald’s work.

Anyway, I returned to Spike Island because apart from a lingering memory that it had been a stylish non-fiction work exploring a largely hidden history in an original and innovative way, I could recall very little of its substance. Perhaps I should have regarded that as a warning sign.

I still think it is a marvellous subject and a hugely ambitious book, but I was saddened to find that rereading it was something of a slog. The prose at times is mannered and congested. There’s an introductory ninety-page section about the pre-history and early settlement of the area that goes on for far too long. And Hoare’s personal obsessions – Oscar Wilde, the decadent, gilded life of Stephen Tennant, his own youth, the early death of a brother, a melancholy nostalgia for an alternative world of glamour beyond the Southampton suburbs – sometimes seem shoehorned-in, disrupting rather than enriching the central narrative.

Spike Island has some bravura passages but I found myself wishing for a more ‘ordinary’ and less personal account. While Netley is a story that demands to be told, Spike Island is also about Netley and its significance in Hoare’s personal mythology. Now there is certainly nothing wrong with such an approach – it is central to Sebald’s method, for instance – but the stakes are high. The more personal and idiosyncratic the writing, the more success depends on the degree to which one feels sympathetic to the writer. In this case I didn’t, and ultimately this did affect how I responded to the book.

 

Alun Severn

February 2017