Ha, ha, and Ha, for good measure. This is very fun and playful and boy, did I have some trepidation going in. Mental health is generally handled pretty poorly. In this, a fictional author, who has come across a salacious book on psychiatry by an enigmatic (again, fictional) author, finds himself in a position of using a story that is unverifiable and tied to the psychiatrist in question: Collins Braithwaite. Conjoining this windfall of a novel with the authors own research into the figure, this novel creates a liminal space where the voracity of the author writing it is in question, as well as the fictional characters in the novel and the biography on Braithwaite (which references further fictional accolades, of course).

If you’re thinking Borges-esk, you wouldn’t be wrong. There are some references in both that are real-world and correct. Things like movies and random books. Also, some characters, such as Braithwaite’s lover, Zelda, seem pretty “inspired” by writers. Hedonistic party romps in the 60s have the couple more than a little reminiscent of the writer(s) of The Great Gatsby.

Primarily, the text is concerned with positing the idea of the self constantly evolving or shifting, kind of like code switching, or roles actors play. And that there is a kind of “madness” in everyone, if that’s the case. At what point is someone’s persona a reality? and what happens when we acknowledge these alternate personas for what they are? Rather than go into an actual diagnostic of the protagonist in the novel, it’s much more concerned about the themes, which then cascade into the alternate components of the narrative in a very playful intertextuality.

Prose work took a bit to get used to, then became absolutely captivating. It’s the write level of pretension for me; both with the character herself, as well as the concept of the novel. It even has some meta humour that lands with me, such as an epilogue where people write into the author of the novel compiled as a second printing note, where they complain about the inaccuracies in the fiction to the physicality of London itself.

When and if this gets its hooks in you, I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did. Wonderful.