Asylum by Patrick McGrath: book review

Asylum (1996) is set in England in 1959, in a hospital asylum for the criminally insane.

Stella Raphael is married to forensic psychiatrist Max, and they have a 10-year-old son Charlie. In 1959 she moves to her husband’s new posting – a house next to the walled city of the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. Prisoner Edgar Stark has the job of renovating the conservatory in Max and Stella’s run-down house.

Edgar Stark is a psychopathic murderer on parole. He beat his wife to death with a hammer, then beheaded her. Peter, his psychiatrist for the past four years, would never let Edgar walk free, if it were his decision.

Narrated by Edgar’s and Stella’s psychiatrist, Peter describes how, slowly and inevitably, Stella befriended Edgar and eventually became his lover.

Stella ‘translated her experience with Edgar Stark into the stuff of melodrama; she made of it a tale of outcast lovers braving the world’s contempt for the sake of a great passion.’ She failed to comprehend how dangerous Edgar was – and still is.

The obsession between them spirals out of control as Edgar secretly plans his next strategy. Not even Stella knows what Edgar is planning.

Peter, on the other hand, is not surprised – after the event, and too late to prevent it.

This is a masterful psychological, suspenseful tale of a dangerous liaison and a journey into the mind of a psychopathic killer, liar, and skilful manipulator – and a bored housewife. Riveting to midway, it loses ground for the next quarter, until it winds up again, and delivers a grand punch at the end.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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