Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

 

9781913393199

Saraband, 2021

278 pp

hardcover

I bought Case Study long before the announcement that it had been selected for this year's Booker Prize longlist,  and like the vast majority of books that come into this house, I  shelved it and promptly moved on to something else.  That was October of last year; last week's above-mentioned announcement reminded me that it has just been sitting there and maybe it was time to read it, not because it landed on the longlist but because I've really enjoyed Graeme Macrae Burnet's previous novels.  As was the case in those books, Case Study blurs the lines between fact and fiction, so much so this time around that I found myself spending way too much time doing google searches while reading.    

Set in 1960s England, Case Study unfolds in two parallel narratives, beginning with the author's ("GMB") receipt of an email from a Martin Grey in Clacton-on-Sea.     As revealed in the Preface, in Glasgow's  "notoriously chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau bookshop," "GMB" had run across a copy of a book written by Collins Braithwaite, who'd made an impression as "something of an enfant terrible" among those in the "so-called anti-psychiatry movement" of the 1960s.  The book, Untherapy, described by GMB as "salacious, iconoclastic and compelling," collected case studies;  Grey's email turned what was at first an interest in Braithwaite on GMB's part into a "properly aroused" curiosity.   Grey explained that he had learned about GMB's interest in Braithwaite after reading a blog post GMB had written;  he then claimed to have come into possession of a series of notebooks written by his cousin containing "certain allegations about Braithwaite" that GMB might like to read. At first refusing, GMB ultimately accepted the offer and the notebooks were sent to him.  He was still not convinced,  but after expressing his skepticism to Grey, he decided that since the notebooks "dovetailed" with his own research "it seemed too apposite to resist."  The result is Case Study, which alternates between the content of the notebooks and GMB's biography of Collins Braithwaite.   

The author of the notebooks, as GMB discovers, is a young, unnamed woman whose sister Veronica, she was convinced, committed suicide two years earlier  after several sessions with Braithwaite.  After having seen the psychologist on television and reading the newspapers the day after that were "filled with condemnation of Dr. Braithwaite's behavior," she bought and read a copy of his  book Untherapy. Obviously the names of his patients had been changed, but she discovered more than one link between a particular "Dorothy" and her sister. After also reading Braithwaite's Kill Your Self, she said, the name of the book had "chilled" her, and by then her interest in this man and his connection to her sister's death had been fully piqued.  She'd thought she might go to the police, but realizing she had nothing to offer them, she decided instead to go directly to  Braithwaite himself.   As she says at one point, "Suicides make Miss Marples of us all," and eager to learn more about Braithwaite, her sister and the method "in Dr. Braithwaite's apparent madness,"  she decided that the only way to find out more about this man was to make an appointment with him.   Realizing she can't go in as Veronica's sister, she took on another persona, an alter-ego if you will --  Rebecca Smyth --  who is quite literally everything our unnamed notebook writer is not and has gone forth with her mission in a quite naïve fashion, not knowing quite what to expect.   

The biographical sections are done almost in documentary style; from the outset we know that GMB has done a lot of research about Braithwaite, and while he "cannot attest" to the truth of the notebooks' contents, which may be, as he says,

"... no more than the flight of fancy of a young woman with self-confessed literary ambitions, and who, by the evidence of her own words, was in a troubled state of mind,"

he takes no chances with his subject, going on to make a "more detailed study of Braithwaite's work" along with conducting interviews with people (some of them from real life)  known to have some sort of connection with him.    Arthur Collins Braithwaite grew up in a working-class family in the North, his mother having abandoned the family when he was still a young boy.  His father, an ironmonger, had decided that his sons would follow him into the family business, but even at an early age Arthur had been determined to go his own way.  After World War II he  studied at Oxford, but was unable to fit in "among the Eton and Harrow boys" and was failing miserably at his studies in Philosophy.   He moved on to France, but it was back in England while working at  Netley at a place "accommodating psychologically scarred veterans," where he met R.D. Laing, a psychologist from Scotland, who "made a lasting impression" on Braithwaite.  Back at Oxford to study psychology at the age of twenty-eight, he slowly began  to find himself "at the centre of things" holding regular meetings in his room ("The Wagstaff Club") where he managed to gather "fawning acolytes" of both sexes; it is here, I think, where we begin to understand just what a narcissistic ass this guy has become, not only in terms of his inflated sense of his own intellectual prowess, but also in his relationships with women.  After graduating with a Ph.D, and without going into any kind of great detail here, he  eventually wrote his Kill Your Self ,  not a smash hit at the time of its publication but a book that would go on to "be soon found in the back pocket of every student and bar-room philosopher."  Braithwaite also  gained a measure of notoriety and a regular clientele after attending a party where actor Dirk Bogarde  was a guest -- this  "unqualified charlatan "was soon getting calls from actors and people connected to the movie and theater business, as well as "cavalcade of beautiful girls and bohemians." He rode this wave for a while, his ego and wallet being fed by these people and his rise to fame.  

The notebooks detail Rebecca's sessions with Braithwaite and also delve into this woman's "real" backstory and current situation; the question eventually becomes one of how far we can trust what she's written. There is an ongoing sort of tension set up between her accounts and the biographical side of things and to be honest,  the more I learned about Braithwaite the more I began to fear for Rebecca, with good reason.  

I've left everything purposely vague here, since anything more would spoil the reading experience (and it is an experience, for sure) but alongside the story, as the dustjacket cover notes reveal, the author brings out themes dealing with "the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself."  More importantly, the idea of what actually constitutes a self runs throughout the book, with ongoing references to topics including doppelgangers and the notion of private vs. public persona.  Despite the seriousness of these ideas, there are also some wickedly funny moments to be found here, and the ending found in the postscript  was for me one of those rare out-loud "wtf" moments.   I had great fun with this book, especially in trying to figure out what was real and what was fiction, which wasn't always easy, but this is the sort of out-there novel I tend to enjoy.   Confession time: I admit that it wasn't too long into the book that I started googling Collins Braithwaite, and from what other readers have to say about this book, I wasn't alone.  Case Study is cleverly constructed, very well written, and for me, insightful, but above all it was highly entertaining.  It's a book I can certainly recommend with no hesitation.

a real-world book group read: Em and the Big Hoom, by Jerry Pinto

9788192328027

Aleph Books, 2012

235 pp

hardcover

"What is a cure when you're dealing with the human mind? What is normal?"

I picked up my phone on Friday morning and my friend and fellow book-group member says to me, "you really put your balls out there with this book," and I suddenly had a panic moment since I hadn't even started it and we meet on Tuesday.  Yikes. After explaining to her that I hadn't even opened it and after some more chatty conversation about the novel,  I figured I'd best be hustling my bustle and get reading. After all, it was my choice for December's group read so I should know something about it, right?    Note the 2012 copyright date -- this book's been sitting on my shelves since it was longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, which is why I bought it in the first place. It didn't win, but it did win the 2012 Hindu Literary Prize.   Oh my god -- 2013 was such a good year for reading, with some excellent novels like Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (a lovely book that no one should miss), River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh, book two of his incredible Ibis trilogy (my favorite historical fiction series ever), and Jeet Thayer's Narcopolis (that year's winner)  to mention only a few.  [As a side note, 2014's winner, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, by Cyrus Mistry, is another no-miss novel that I can highly recommend. Memo to self - put that one on next year's group read list.]  Anyway, I started Em and the Big Hoom after that phone call, took a break around 6:30 to go out for Thai and then finished it Saturday morning. 

The first thing I'll say is that it was difficult to keep myself grounded in the idea that this was fiction since it reads so much like a memoir.  One reviewer's overall opinion: "often wonderful writing, but feels too anchored in the auto/biographical" which I assume is a negative here, but I thought otherwise. To create a fiction that reads like reality is to me a mark of a good author; if it is based in reality, well, to put forth one's very soul  cloaked in fiction is a gutsy, bold move, but to each his/her own, of course.  The Em of the title is the narrator's mother, Imelda, who is married to Augustine, aka the Big Hoom.  The story is told via the son, the younger of two children born into this family (the other is daughter Susan), who as he says, wants to "try and understand her," to 

"try and figure out how this happened to my mother, once a beautiful woman with a lovely singing voice, and -- yes -- how this happened to my father, a man with a future who had given it all up to make sure the present was manageable. For her. For us."

Our first clue that something is not quite right is that the novel opens in "Ward 33 (Psychiatric) Sir J.J. Hospital."  The serious bipolar depression that keeps landing her there after several suicide attempts is the "this" that the son is trying to understand, but the novel is so much more than a young man trying to understand his mother's mental illness, which is difficult in and of itself.  At one point Em notes that "Nobody knows what I am going through," and her son agrees:

"Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You're a tourist; she's a resident."

But his real aim is to get underneath her condition, to recover the woman herself, doing so via her stories, her many writings, and what she says when she's speaking in a free-association sort of way, although this isn't always easy, as he notes, since

"Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it. You had to keep finding your way back to the main street in order to get anywhere."

One way to approach this novel is as a sort of testimony to Em, but at the same time, it's the Big Hoom who also gets much credit, for being the glue that holds the family together as they undergo crisis after crisis. And then, of course, the son, who just dreads that he may be watching his own future play out in what's happening to Em.  The thing about this book is that there is so much at work here that my short little post can't possibly do it the justice it deserves; there are so many layers to uncover and so many relevant topics that crop up throughout the story that it is again one of those books that a person needs to discover on his/her own.

It's a lovely novel, poignant, sad, filled with despair, but sometimes funny in a darkly humorous sort of way, and frankly, sometimes it's just flat-out, absolutely frightening.  And now that I've written that sentence, it seems to me that my reaction to this book must mirror a range of emotions that caretakers or family members of those suffering the same "madness" as Em does here must also experience, so to me the "auto/biographical" feel becomes even more real.  It's a good writer, I say, who can bring those feelings out onto the page where they then transfer into my head and live there for the duration.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I'm just sad that it's taken me three years to get to it.

other reviews worth noting:

The Guardian
The Complete Review
The Toronto Star

I would skip the Kirkus review, because once again, it's written by someone who did not thoroughly read the novel, as is made obvious in the statement that says "the father, unaccountably, is the Big Hoom."  Well, Kirkus reviewer person, had you actually paid attention, on page 7 the author spells it out for you how that nickname may have come about.

just another month of summer left -- don't miss The Farm, by Tom Rob Smith

9780446550734
Grand Central Publishing, 2014
352 pp

hardcover

"It was a contradiction that she'd always shielded me from trauma, yet when it came to fairy tales she'd willfully sought out more disturbing stories, as if trying to compensate, giving me in fiction that which she'd tried so hard to take away from real life." 

I've seen a number of  descriptions  of  The Farm that have labeled it as a thriller, and there is a lot of merit in  wanting to pigeonhole it as such, but once I finished it, I realized that there was much more besides the stuff of thrillers going on here.  It's really a multilayered story within a story within a story that is slowly peeled back like the proverbial onion until you reach its core.  That is not to say that there are no thrillling moments in the novel -- on the contrary,  there are a number of moments where I turned pages quickly to see what possibly could happen next, and where in my head, I believed I'd figured out the "conspiracy" taking place in the Swedish forest where the action is set. And then, of course, there's that wonderful opening sequence. The narrator, Daniel, receives a call from his dad Chris telling him that his mom Tilde is sick, that she's been "imagining things -- terrible, terrible things," and that she's been sick all summer. Now she seems to be "suffering from a psychotic episode," and is now voluntarily committed.  As Daniel gets ready to make the trip from London to Sweden, his father calls him again to tell him that there's a problem -- Tilde, it seems, is not there; she's evidently convinced the doctors to let her go and now Chris has no clue where she may be. He does inform his son that he is among the people Tilde's been making accusations against, and that "none of what she claims is real."  While Chris rings off to check their joint bank account, Daniel gets a call from his mother saying that she'll be landing in London in just two hours and that

"Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad. I don't need a doctor. I need the police."

From there, Tilde and Daniel sit for hours and hours while she goes through a satchel filled with what she calls evidence of her husband's involvement in a horrible criminal conspiracy; while Daniel wants her to get the point, she insists on going through each exhibit one by one, in chronological order.  The story she tells reveals much to Daniel about herself and her husband, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion,  Daniel comes to realize a lot about himself.

from http://pixabay.com/en/lake-saxen-sweden-water-forest-77217/

The Farm is a twisty novel, one that really plays on reader expectations.  The reader, up to a point,  takes the same position as Daniel here, having to decide whether or not Tilde's version of things is true and his dad is guilty of terrible crimes,  or whether she really does need to be back in a hospital receiving treatment.  Daniel faces the unenviable task of serving as both judge and jury,  while in the meantime he begins to realize that there are a number of things about his parents he never knew,  leading to the idea that maybe we don't know people as well as we think we do -- most especially members of our own families.  I can't really say much without giving away the show.

This is another one of those books where I had to take time to let things come together in my head, but I have to say, I ended up liking it.  The Swedish setting with its forests, lakes and snow-covered ground provides the perfect backdrop for Tilde's chilling and highly-atmospheric story.  While there are some spots where the pace seems sort of sluggish, each time Tilde took something out of her satchel things started to heat up again and I was drawn back in and  ready for whatever might happen next.  The ending comes fast, sort of out of proportion to the big buildup that proceeded it, but it is a bit of a shocker. It also hit home the idea that as much as you may want to ignore the past, sometimes it might be better to confront it.  I also felt that since Daniel has such a weight on his shoulders here, he might have shown as much energy throughout the story as he did toward the end, but in the long run, The Farm is a really good summer read that will leave you thinking about those closest to you and the secrets they carry. It's also a heck of a ride.

The Shock of the Fall/Where The Moon Isn't, by Nathan Filer

9780007491438
HarperCollins, 2013
310 pp

hardcover, UK ed.



"This is my life. I'm nineteen years old, and the only thing I have any control over in my entire world is the way I choose to tell this story."

So says Matt Homes,  a 19-year-old schizophrenic who is not only struggling with his own illness, but long-held grief and guilt as well.  Writing is his own form of therapy,  and The Shock of the Fall is his story.  I defy anyone not to be even the least bit moved by this novel. It has a genuinely honest feel, and might possibly open up your mind a bit to what it might be like to suffer from a debilitating mental illness, with or without medication.  Just a side note before I launch: The Shock of the Fall has been published in the US as  

Where the Moon Isn't

St. Martin's Press, 9781250026989. 

Matt begins his story ten years earlier with a family vacation, where something goes terribly wrong. Four people -- Matt, his parents, and his brother Simon -- arrive at Ocean Cove Holiday Park, and only three go home. As Matt says of Simon at the outset, "in a couple of pages he'll be dead." The narrative moves through Matt's story before Simon dies, to returning home after his death and the onset of Matt's illness,  to his time   in a psychiatric ward, to living on his own, and finally, to exactly how Simon died ten years ago. Through it all, Matt's grief and guilt travel with him as he tries to come to terms with both, all  while trying to cope with his schizophrenia.

What's so great about this novel is how the author can keep a strain of humor going even while revealing just how much confusion and pain Matt is caught up in as his illness progresses.  For example, on one page, Matt writes

"I've made people feel sorry for me before, mostly psychiatric nurses -- either the newly-qualified ones who haven't learnt to get a grip, or the gooey-eyed maternal ones who take one look at me and see what could have happened to their own. A student nurse told me how my patient notes had nearly made her cry. I told her to go fuck herself. That finished the job off."

while on the next page, Matt relives a time in his friend Jacob's room where he starts talking about smoking a Bucket Bong.

There are also very realistic moments as Matt starts talking about how repetitive life is on the ward, and the "difference between living and existing." He picks Day 13 as an example of his "cut-and-paste life", beginning with

"7 a.m...Get woken by a knock on my bedroom door, and the call for morning medication round. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, a side effect of the sleeping tablets."

and ending with the next day

"7 a.m ...Get woken by a knock on my bedroom door, and the call for morning medication round. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, a side effect of the sleeping tablets.

(Repeat)"

And then there are the well-imagined characters: Matt's mother and father, both trying hard to carry on after Simon's death and supporting Matt through the onset and progression of illness. There is one scene that I absolutely loved where Matt is escorted to his flat where earlier, his dad had been "quietly painting over the madness" Matt had "covered the walls with."  Matt turns on the light and notices that his father had left him a message, "the first and only time my dad has ever graffitied on a wall."  His dad had written a note that he never realized Matt would see that said 

"We'll beat this thing mon ami. We'll beat this thing together." 

Definitely a tear-jerker moment for me.  The other characters are also well drawn, impeccably described through Matt's eyes: Nanny Noo, the grandmother who also has a brother with schizophrenia, whose heart must be broken, as Matt notes, "to know that I was next"; Jacob, Matt's best friend who can take care of an ailing mother but for whom Matt's illness is too much to handle; there are also the nurses, staff and patients at the hospital.

This book is painful, yes. Sad, yes, but sometimes you can't help but laugh. I also think that especially here in the US, as the debate about the sad state of mental health care in this country is going on, the book is a very timely read.  It is also engaging to the point where you may have trouble putting it down.  Frankly, I loved this book and whether or not it recently won a prestigious award is beside the point.  It's just plain and solidly phenomenal.