REVIEW The Asylum by Johan Theorin

If a darker, more chilling and gripping novel than The Asylum crosses the door of ShadePoint this year, it will be a huge surprise. Already a favourite writer here, Johan Theorin has returned to the form that made The Darkest Room a ShadePoint Book of the Year.

The Asylum has a slight trace of the denouement difficulties that perhaps took the edge off Theorin's last, The Quarry, but is overall a vastly superior book - and The Quarry was actually very good! In many places The Asylum was simply 'unputdownable' to be honest - and very often, it is utterly macabre and screeching with tension one minute and pulsing with dread the next. While largely seen as a crime writer, it seems at ShadePoint that Theorin has always written with strong echoes of horror and the modern gothic and The Asylum is no exception. In many, many ways this book is more the stuff of Jack Torrance and The Overlook than it is the world of Wallander and Ystad police station.

In the novel Jan has started work at the Dell Nursery, an experimental establishment linked to Saint Patricia's Regional Psychiatric Hospital. The children in the nursery are able to visit a parent in the facility next door, and in some cases are resident. 'St Psycho's' is a great brooding stone edifice from the 19th century, looming over the tiny temporary preschool building like a gothic beast behind its high fences and security systems. In the novel's central device, the two buildings are linked by an underground tunnel. It is this almost impossible-seeming connection that provides some of the novel's most haunting and nerve-whittling moments. As I have said before about Susan Hill and The Woman in Black it is the case that a unique, unforgettable setting is often one of the key reasons for a novel's success - and so it is with The Asylum and this chilling underground pathway. In its initial appearances it has an effect not unlike Clarice Starling's memorable walk through those corridors in Baltimore.

Almost from the start, the reader is made aware that there is darkness and remoteness within Jan himself, that he harbours desires to get inside the hospital, and that his own past is as crowded with shadows and secrets as the hospital courtyard when night descends. As the novel progresses, we discover he is not alone in this. The narrative moves through three time zones, and dark inter-connected patterns and horror stories emerge and many of the characters become drawn deeply in. The reader is compelled to read on through this unfolding despair and menace, tempted into the darkness in much the same way that marks Patricia Highsmith's characterisation: as we follow Ripley here, there and everywhere, and the uneasiness rises, still we maintain a connection to this dangerous and difficult 'hero'.

From very early on, Theorin achieves a sense of dread that never leaves. Even considering issues ShadePoint had with the ending - more of which later - the tension is never diminished.There is never an instant where stopping reading seems remotely possible and the novel had that very rare quality of total compulsion and immersion that marks out the great thrillers. It is testament to the drive of the story that any implausibilities are largely ignored as the pages drive on. 

Shortly after starting work, Jan sees an old woman 'behind the fence' - she is dressed in black, sweeping dead leaves. He looks away, and looks back:

"But the woman behind the fence has disappeared. Only the pile of leaves remains."

This atmosphere keeps up, particularly as Jan's backstory emerges and Theorin plunges the reader into the basement of the hospital, trapping us in a series of darker and darker holes, forests, and tunnels. And there is one downright shocking scene towards the end which anyone with claustrophobia will have a really hard time reading. A baby monitor system is also employed in one of the most unusual ways since Andrew Pyper's The Guardians and there is an old rickety lift put to unbearably eerie use. The reader is led this way through the half light from one setpiece eerieness to another, relentlessly. Are there rats down there, Jan wonders at one point? Quite...

A book like this could easily be unpalatable in terms of the way it presents mental ill health, and the care for people who endure it, but it isn't. This is in part because of the way the narration works, but also in the use of the backstories, and a real sense that Theorin is taking this context very seriously indeed, that he is prepared to work well beyond stereotype, to try to find some truth at the heart of what is going on. Sure, there are a fair few Shutter Island style moments - not least the 'grey sacks' in the basement, the strange twilight figures roaming around in seemingly abandoned parts of the hospital - but on the whole, I believe Theorin's intentions are good, and that despite the thriller centre, the novel has some very empathetic and sensitive things to say.

I have to be honest, and say that unfortunately, the ending didn't quite hold up to the rest of the novel. This could easily be because the rest of the novel is so astonishingly tense and achieved that any ending would suffer, and maybe perhaps because it was just not the ending I wanted.  Either of these are possible - and I suspect the latter. My issues with how the story was wrapped up, however, were in no way significant enough to override what a superb book this is for almost all of its pages - for me. Lots of people will probably love the ending. Without wanting to put too much out there as a spoiler, I just thought that too many ends came together in the last sections, without really needing to, and that there was a slight drop in the immersion factor as these strands snapped together in the closing pages.

This is of course a shame: with a handful of chapters to go, The Asylum was shaping up to be an absolute, undeniable five-star legend in the making. Having said that, the further I move away from reading the book in time, the less and less this denouement worry seems to matter, and it may be that I'm wrong about that ending. What sustains of The Asylum is the endless tension of the story, the brilliance of setting, and the skills of a thriller writer of great talent - not to mention his translator - pushing as close as can be to the very top of the game.

REVIEW The Forbidden by F.R. Tallis

 

The world turns and we move from light into darkness, from darkness into light. With light comes warmth, with darkness, cold. Everything that lives and breathes depends on the light for its continued existence. All growth is stunted by darkness …

The 1870s. When young doctor Paul Clement returns to Paris from the French Colony of San Sebastien, he unwittingly takes with him a curse that defines the plot of The Forbidden, a superb novel of the undead and demonic possession by F.R. Tallis. Experimenting in Paris with new resuscitation techniques in order to sight the mysteries of life and death, Clement allows himself to die and be returned – but forgetting his island curse, does not reanimate quite as planned.

In a gothic tour de force, The Forbidden reminded this reader of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, The Island of Dr Moreau and of a dark and brilliant novel that I had somehow forgotten, The Lightning Cage by Alan Wall. Occasionally too, those two eerie masterpieces of Peter Ackroyd, Hawsksmoor and The House of Doctor Dee and one of the most underrated books, ever, the marvellous Pilgrim, by Timothy Findley. There are also quite strong echoes of Interview with the Vampire.

Rather than a negative, it’s always a good sign here at Shade Point when all these fleeting similarities bubble up, because it means a book has captured that macabre junction between the historical, the otherworldly, the thrilling and the unsettling that really is so much the meat and drink of all the favourites of this site. The Forbidden is a fast paced whirlwind through Zombie curses, undead transformations, arcane knowledge, demonic possession and was so enjoyable it was read in a couple of days. Not for the faint hearted, the book is often extremely gruesome, and memorably creepy in places, and it has an undercurrent of dread and menace conveyed brilliantly by the exceptional period narration. The book is really well written.

Great fun can be had with many of the events of the novel – the hurried trap rides in darkness, the exorcisms, the Brundle-esque physical transformations, the esoteric lore, the fabulously realised demons. These are little escapist wonders for genre fans. But the novel has deeper darker layers: the psychological study of good and evil, some eye watering sadism and a trip to Hell that is as unforgettably grim as any Heironymus Bosch imagining. 

Overall, this is the first real genre masterwork we’ve read this year, and it is incredibly exciting to learn that Tallis, a crime writer ‘by day’, has a ghost novel appearing later this year. We may have a very special series about to take shape. The Forbidden at least will be the excellent, page turning, cheerfully malevolent opener.

F.R. Tallis has some really interesting background to the novel on his site here.

REVIEW Dominion by C.J. Sansom

*MILD SPOILERS*

C.J. Sansom is one of my favourite writers, and I'll read anything he puts out.

To digress from the main point of this review, I often think of Sansom whenever the subject of digital publishing and e-readers comes up. Years ago I was on a ship, in a storm, and I was reading Sansom's Shardlake novel, Dissolution. I have such a clear memory of this experience, such a vivid 'book-memory', that every time I think about Kindles and so on, I think about this episode and can't help wondering if we will lose this strong connection to the memory of particular physical books and the part they played at times in our lives. I remember completely the crashing and rolling of the ship, and just as clearly, the rapt turning of the pages as my first introduction to Shardlake and his world unfolded. I sort of remember that book now much as a friend, keeping me company while a Force 10 bashed us about the sea. Ever since, Sansom has been a special writer for me. And every time I ponder the move to reading a black plastic container rather than a paper book, I think of Shardlake and his embossed cover. Apt, I think, for a writer with such dedication to interpreting the past.

 

I guess I'm also telling this story rather than getting on with the review because I want to be absolutely clear that even though I'm slightly disappointed by Dominion, as I was by Sansom's last Heartstone, I really am a big fan. I think he may just have temporarily entered into that 'massive novel' era that Stephen King had for a while, where the size of the books and the readability seem to be heading in slightly different directions. I felt the same about Heartstone -  Dominion could easily have been 200 or more pages shorter. Like Heartstone, I was at least a hundred or so into the story before it started to grip and for a while was genuinely worried I had found a C.J. Sansom novel I couldn't finish. I needn't have worried of course, stuck with it and by the end felt hugely rewarded, but briefly, bleakly, it didn't look good. More of this later.

 

Sansom praises one of my favourite books, Fatherland by Robert Harris, in his bibliography. Dominion occupies similar imaginative ground. Britain has conceded defeat to Nazi Germany, and to all purposes is now a puppet state, while war continues to rage between Russia and the Nazis - even to 1952, when the novel is set. Into this scenario, and Sansom spends a great deal of time outlining the social, political and demographic details of it, the reader joins a desperate chase as a group of resistance activists seek to rescue a scientist from a pyschiatric hospital in England and deliver him by submarine to America, so that secrets he has gleaned from his visiting brother from the States are not lost to the Nazis.

 

Now, Sansom has clearly done an enormous amount of research and an enormous amount of thinking about this alternate British history. The book is crammed with great detail about how Britain might have turned out as a place to live day to day, and framed against some fairly huge strategic thinking about how the country would be placed in world events. This is undeniably a superb feat of the imagination, and to a certain extent the description is fascinating and for some readers it will be a pure joy. It is a very 'historical' novel, even if it is an alternative history. His reading list suggests exhaustive attention to detail and this is borne out by the background work in the story.

 

While it takes a fair time to get going, Dominion does become thrilling - the last third in particular being essentially a chase, a lethal hide and seek. The reader grows to care for the central group of characters, and indeed, the secondary characters caught up in the drama - most movingly in the fate of one of the secretaries in the civil service office of the main protagonist. Hunted down by British Special Branch and a grim SS officer by the name of Gunther Hoth, the group struggle to secure their human MacGuffin, the scientist Frank Muncaster. The world this story moves through, shabby, impoverished, dangerous, is incredibly well described and there is always a sense of great threat in the setting.

 

This threat in terms of plot, though, is diminished by the length of the book. Bluntly, the reader could be allowed greater room to move about for themselves in the imagined world - it is in the end, too relentlessly described. For the first third in particular, it seems impossible for there to be any dialogue between the characters that does not in some way flesh out the various dimensions of setting. Often, this extends to the backstories of characters, where not only their own journeys, but what these journeys represent in the historical infrastructure, is related in detail. Often it feels as if the characters serve the setting, rather than the other way around. The issue here may in the end be whether the reader comes to this novel expecting a thriller - I did - or historical novel with thriller elements. The latter is the most accurate. The loser in all the detail is pace.

 

In the thriller, like Fatherland, if it is well done, the writer can throw away much of this detail, and just suspend the readers' disbelief as the story rattles along. It may sound cheap, but we really don't mind - we're prepared to go with the story come hell or high water. Whether this particular politician did this, or this particular treaty led to this and then that, and how plausible this is, is to an extent unimportant - albeit a critical balance that is hard to achieve. In Dominion, while undeniably brilliant in its scope, the creation of the backstory takes over far too often in the first half. This leads to some fairly jolting exposition during discussions between groups of characters as it is further set out.

 

At the same time, I also think of other writers, Graham Greene for example, who could set thrilling novels in intensely complicated political situations, eg The Quiet American, without either swamping the reader in detail or reducing in any way the difficulties of the times, or lessening our concern to understand them accurately once the book is finished. In his historical note, Sansom continues to describe his political reasoning for the novel in detail, his fears for the future, and sets this out in clear terms, as well as working through several strands of the speculative thinking for the setting (supporters of the Scottish National Party may well want to stay clear altogether!).

 

The thriller expectation is also diminished by, to my mind, two implausibilities. Firstly, the reader is expected to sustain over nearly 600 pages the core idea that somehow in a matter of minutes enough of the secret that makes Muncaster the centre of the chase could have been conveyed to make it all necessary, while at the same time having predicted easily what the secret was likely to be for themselves. Secondly, in a world where brutality and unbelievable deviousness are the norm, we have to believe that the Nazis - as implacable and deadly as Hoth and his cohorts are - would be unable to simply walk into the institution where Muncaster is kept and take him immediately. There is an explanation for this, which seems almost bureacratic, and it doesn't really work - not when people are murdered in the streets and tortured throughout. As a thriller reader, I can accept readily a sketchier outline of hugely important historical background, but have greater trouble with these problems.

 

But having said all this, I did really enjoy it overall, and by the end, felt incredibly pleased to have read the book, and certain that once my struggles with the detail of the setting are forgotten, what will be remembered is a bold, ambitious and deeply thoughtful novel with a strongly empathetic historical sensibility, written by one of our foremost historical novelists and thriller writers.