![]() Something of a blockbuster, set mostly in Addis Ababa where gifted doctors wash up one by one in an under-resourced but profoundly humane institution. The Quickening Maze by Adam Fouldsīased on the true and strange overlap of John Clare and Alfred Tennyson in a Victorian lunatic asylum (only Clare was a patient), Foulds's novel is a model of the beauty that can be achieved with a restricted setting and characters dictated by the historical record.Ħ-10: The best hospital novels explore the relationships between clinical healing and less measurable kinds of recovery 6. This hospital becomes the complement to Esther's college education, a place where she can learn possible modes of survival for an intelligent woman in 1950s America. ![]() Unable to commit to either, her actions become increasingly chaotic until she attempts suicide and is admitted first to a state hospital and then, following the intervention of the novelist who funds her university scholarship, to a private institution where she is kindly treated by female doctors and nurses. Esther Greenwood, taking an English degree at an elite women's college not unlike Plath's, sees a rapidly approaching choice between marriage and a literary career. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plathīible of generations of clever and misunderstood teenage girls, Plath's coming-of-age novel seems to affirm a connection between madness and creativity. A fictionalised account of her own incarceration, written with such lightness of touch that it's exhilarating to read despite the grim subject. Faces in the Water by Janet Frameįrame's writing is always beautiful. There is nothing redemptive about this hospital, where the authorities represented by "The Combine" use every tactic from lying and manipulation to lobotomy to control patients. The fictional child of RD Laing and Foucault, a novel in which the asylum is a prison for the punishment of those who have offended social norms without breaking the law. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey In a novel with few female characters, the exploration of different kinds of masculinity in a time of war is deeply engaging. The hospital is a place of healing, where there is some space for attempts to redress the damage of war, but it is in the end a military institution that exacts the final loyalty of its most ambitious employees. Set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh during the first world war, Pat Barker's Booker prize winner focuses on the work of Dr William Rivers with victims of shell-shock and trauma. We spend hours in the company of imaginary friends ourselves and the research is more fun and easier to fudge than learning about cardiology or neurosurgery. Even in the late 19th century of my novel when far more people were born and died at home, hospitals were by definition sites of major life events shaped by institutional ritual.Įvery novelist loves a madhouse. I find hospitals particularly fascinating because of the harmony or discord between the stories of nurses, patients and doctors, and because of the complicated relationships between power, suffering and healing.
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