Spike Island by Philip Hoare, 1841152935, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Rambling and undecided what kind of book it is

I found myself skipping sections of this book. It was thin on those aspects of the Hospital I was interested in and was fluffed out with tenuous links and diverged into fanciful passages and recent personal memories from the author. Scant illustrations. I put the book down unsatisfied.

A Southamptonian delight!

From Pat Moore (whom I knew) to Philip Hoare, this is quite the most evocative and beautifully written book that I have ever read. It is James Joyce with punctuation. It haunts me with memories of youth and not belonging, of small-town embarrassment and anonymity, but grows to a reconciling pride in our local character. The author's research into the history of Spike Island is a fascinating vehicle for his exploration of being young, emotional and curious. To me - and, I hope, to many others - this is the most well-constructed, entertaining, imaginative, haunting and compelling piece of writing that I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. I was young again and having familiar memories reinterpreted. My sincere thanks to its author.

John Foley.

Beautiful and melancholy account of Netley Hospital

I have never read any other book that is able to capture the spirit of a place quite like this book. As I small child, I can well remeber being taken to Netley Abbey on Sunday afternoons and the erie description the Hoare evokes is spot on.
Much of this book concerns itself with the pioneering military hospital, a close neighbour of the abbey and which too evokes a morbid fascination as what remains of the establishment is enveloped in a cloak of melancholy. Hoare explains the fate of the first inhabitants of the hospital, the secret experiments that are supposed to have taken place and even the odd ghost story. Wrapped up in this are a cast of diverse characters such as Jane Austen and Wilfrid Owen. The writer captures the decay of Southampton as a great transatlantic port with aplomb.
This is a book that I could not put down and that got passed around amongst family and friends who similarly were entralled by the extremely well-written narrative. Recommended, especially for all readers around Southampton.

A very unusual book.

This is a most unusual book that is hard to categorise. It combines history, recollection, literature and family history in a fascinating way. The one problem is that the photographs are terrible. They are very dark, and it's extremely difficult to make them out - which is perhaps why the writer gives a detailed description of them in the text! Surely the editor could have sorted this out?

Great idea - shame about the self-indulgence

At times Philip Hoare's refusal to write the excellent book his subject and his talents deserve seems almost wilful. The inter-locking of his own reminiscences and the history of Netley Hospital sometimes works well, more often not, and by the end the impossibly fey and self-indulgent epilogue has the reader gasping for the finish-line. Mr. Hoare seems to think that he has something significant to say about dreams and reality; if he has, it escaped me - except to note that he seems to have been (to still be?) highly imaginative in his youth. I can well understand the differences of opinion about how well he writes. Much of the time he achieves clarity and momentum, only to let himself down by extended passages of 'fine writing', filled with similes of dubious value. The strained comparisons between Netley Abbey and the hospital are among the more annoying, as are his far too frequent references to Stephen Tennant, the subject of a previous book by his. Equally perverse is the decision to reproduce photographs in small size on matt paper so that the reader cannot compare the descriptions of details in the text. The quality of research, the frequently efficient presentation of material and (above all) the fascination of the subject gave pleasure, but I am now going to see if Amazon stocks a book that actually tells the story of Netley.

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