Asylum is a story about the consequences of obsessional love. In this dark novel, the wife of a resident psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane becomes deeply infatuated with a very disturbed inmate who murdered his wife. When he escapes, she follows him to London, and his madness unravels in ways that deeply affect everyone involved in their past. None of the characters in this book is likeable. Stella, the wife, is despicable, her psychiatrist husband is a weak "mama's boy," and the peripheral characters are without redeeming qualities. The novel is narrated by Cleave, another psychiatrist with his own agenda. Patrick McGrath is certainly a master at displaying the dark side of human nature. ( )

Asylum tells the story of Stella Raphael, a woman who becomes sexually involved with Edgar Stark, a patient in the mental hospital were her husband is the deputy administration. We know right from the beginning that things will go badly for the characters in this Gothic tale of infidelity and madness. And things do get bad, very quickly. And then they get worse. And psychotherapist Peter Cleave chronicles it all, basing his tale on his own observations and what Stella herself told him.

Cleave sees Stella as passionately devoted to Stark and seems to believe that this devotion underlies all her actions, but as the story goes on, Cleave’s role as narrator become muddier and muddier until the truth of the situation becomes entirely unclear. We know that Cleave got a lot of information from Stella, but why should we assume Stella was honest? And eventually, we are given reason to doubt Cleave’s own words. So we’re left with an unreliable narrator telling a story that was told to him by another unreliable narrator. Very Wuthering Heights. And in a good way.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

Max Raphael is the new Deputy Superintendent at a provincial asylum outside London. Stella, his beautiful, gregarious, intelligent wife is suffocating in her marriage. She embarks on a intense and dangerous affair with patient Edgar Stark, who is incarcerated for murdering his wife and then mutilating her corpse.

The initiation, the duration, and the fall-out of the affair is all narrated in the cool, clinical tones of Max's colleague at the asylum, Peter Cleave. However, from the very beginning there is a sense that Cleave might not be the most reliable of narrators. He certainly shows a very keen interest in both Edgar and Stella, in different ways, and seems to be omniscient in their lives, if not in reality, then certainly within his own imaginings.

But what is reality, and what are imaginings? The beauty of McGrath's writing is the ability to produces images of abject horror in plain, unfussy language. Indeed, some images become all the more horrible simply because the reader can easily imagine the measured tones of Cleave as he tells us in detail of the psychiatric breakdown of the people involved. The voice of Cleave is sane, but is the character?

This is a book of light and dark. Of summer and winter. Night and day. There are shadows and ghosts and monsters, all of them lurking in the most respectable of people. Asylum is all of those review cliches: compelling, unputdownable, relentless. But, I mean it, it really is.

And the last line. *shudder* ( )

This reminded me of Madame Bovary in a lot of ways. Stella is portrayed as a bored woman, trapped in a marriage that doesn’t come close to fulfilling her. Unlike Mme. B, she doesn’t actively tear down her husband. Instead, she starts this affair with Stark. She doesn’t believe that this man who so captivates her could have possibly done what he did (which we aren’t told in detail until the end). Stark uses her to escape and later sends for her.

It was pretty creepy. The language was terrific though. Not too poetic and not too stark. Nice flow and description of Stella’s encroaching madness. The dreams. Her screwing of the landlord of their house in Wales. She was out there and didn’t care. Although, even then she was just as careful to conceal what she was doing as she was when she was screwing Edgar at the hospital. For all her madness, she knew what she was doing had to be concealed. ( )

I love an unreliable narrator. And I love neo-gothic fiction. And everybody loves a good story of sexual obsession. Throw all that together here and you've got a great book. It reminded me of those old-fashioned adultery novel like The Awakening or Madame Bovary, and that is quite a compliment. ( )