30 Day Challenge 1 * Day 25 *

30 Day Challenge 1
Day 25
Tell us about the last book you read



Unfortunately looking up this book cover I came to realise this has actually been made into a film. How depressing...will I ever get to read a book that hasn't been made into a film? Lmao...what a let down *sigh*

Anyway!
Asylum by Patrick McGrath!
Spoilers ahead I suppose

The premise of the novel is that Stella, the wife of a psychiatrist, falls for one of the inmates of the mental institution who is helping to replenish their garden and rebuild their conservatory. Edgar is in there for killing his wife (then cutting off her head, cutting out her eyes and mangling her face with his clay tools). They begin a passionate affair and he ends up escaping from the institution. The staff all suspect that she has been having relations with him and so judge her, and eventually she runs away to join him hiding in a grotty old building in London, leaving her husband and son behind.
Eventually Edgar's psychotic personality starts shining through and he assaults her. She runs away and ends up being caught by police and taken back to her husband.
He decides he wants to make it work, and is shamed in his job, so he moves them to north Wales where he gets another psychiatric job and she can re-cooperate while looking after the house and their son.
She eventually starts falling into a depression, missing Edgar, missing the excitement, and while she loses her grip on sanity it culminates in an awful scene where she watches her son drown, just smoking a fag and staring out to sea. That was really horrible to read.
Anyway, so she is taken back to the original mental institution as an inmate, and the narrator of the book - who is another psychiatrist that works there - is her new confidante and after a while she knows all the right things to say to make him think she's on the mend.
Here's where I started being sceptical with this book...this narrator, Peter, decides that he wants to retire, and asks Stella (after asking her estranged husband) if she would marry him and move away and live out the rest of their lives together. What?! I don't understand that point of view and I think it's a very unrealistic and unprofessional to ask a psychiatric patient that kind of thing. And especially with her track record! (She also - lacking emotion - shagged the farmer that lived next door in North Wales) And especially when I really enjoyed the narrator's emotional yet psychiatric approach to telling her story, it seemed to go against everything. But hey. Who am I to judge lol.
So anyway, life on the ward carries on, and at the yearly ball she gets herself dressed up all nice - which to Peter is a way of showing staff and patients alike that she is not embarrassed by what has happened in the last year, but to Stella is a show of affection for Edgar as she wears the same dress she wore at last years ball - and then afterwards goes back to her room where she's been hiding her pills and kills herself.
In a way I see it as a weak ending, but at the same time it fits her mental state, she was still yearning for Edgar but knew she'd never get to see him again.
Funny thing I suppose, or tragic, is that they had caught Edgar, and he was actually one of Peters patients again in the very same hospital...

I enjoyed this book on the most part. I do not agree that it's 'a tour de force of suspense' as it says on the cover, as I didn't find there to be any 'suspense' in it at all...but I still found it intriguing! As I do with anything psychiatry-involved :)

Sorry I just pretty much told the entire story...not quite sure why I went into that much detail lmao, just did it without thinking! Ah well. So that's Asylum by Patrick McGrath.

Now to try and find the film *sobs*