What It Takes To Be Human by Marilyn Bowering
| What It Takes To Be Human by Marilyn Bowering | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Melony Sanders
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| Summary: The story of Sandy Grey, who is incarcerated in an asylum just before the Second World War, is coupled with that of another man, who died after being wrongly accused of murder. This book provides an interesting insight into mental health issues and is well written, although falls down on characterisation. | |
| Buy? No | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 304 | Date: June 2007 |
| Publisher: Maia Press Limited | |
| ISBN: 978-1904559269 | |
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At the beginning of World War II, Sandy Grey wants to sign up to fight, but is stopped by his father, who has other ideas for his son's life. When Sandy fights back, he is sent to an asylum. There, unsure of exactly what he is doing there, he tries to keep himself sane by writing about a man who was wrongly accused of murder many years before and died in the asylum when it was a jail. Sandy hopes that by proving this man innocent, he will also be able to prove to the asylum authorities that he is able to live a normal life. He is helped in his mission by a doctor who is on his side and a widow, who has her own problems, but thwarted by a psychopathic asylum assistant, who takes an instant dislike to Sandy. Will Sandy be able to prove that he is sane?
For many years, I have suffered from depression and earlier this year, I spent several weeks on a psychiatric ward because of a breakdown. As such, I am very interested in mental health issues and find the changes in the mental health system over the years fascinating. Back in the 1940s, lobotomies and electric shock treatment were very common treatments, and cruel though it seems now, they were thought to be reasonable options at the time. I therefore had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, although it did provide an interesting insight (if ficitional) into the treatment of a patient in 1940s Canada, I found this book didn't quite meet my expectations.
Sandy Grey is a very young man - just nineteen - when he is incacerated in the asylum. Although it is not explained exactly why he ended up there until later in the book, it is made clear that he is there because of a mistake, rather than any long history of mental illness. Despite this, I still found it very difficult to empathise with his predicament. It is hard to understand exactly why this is the case - the man is bullied by one of the asylum assistants and has a love for the animals for which it is his job to care - both reasons that would usually melt my heart - but I just couldn't bring myself to care all that much for what happened to him. He does build relationships with some of the men in the asylum, including two of the doctors, one of the assistants and a patient, and also has a mother/son relationship with the widow, Georgina, but none of these relationships seem to be realistic and just end up being part of the book without really adding anything.
The book is written in quite an interesting way. We have Sandy's story, which provides the main bulk of the book, but alongside this, we also have the story of Alan Macaulay (told by Sandy), who suffered a miscarriage of justice years before. The author seems to suggest that by telling Alan's story, Sandy's own predicament will be sorted. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite come off and by the end of the book, Alan's story has more or less drifted into obscurity.
The standard of writing is high. Marilyn Bowering has apparently won awards for her writing and it is easy to see why - she writes clearly and fluently and her descriptions of scenery in particular are very good. Had her writing talent extended to the characters, I think that this book would have been much stronger. My only criticism of her writing is during Sandy's coversations with Karl, a German patient. Instead of adding his accent into the speech, Bowering puts the pronunciation in brackets after it - for example: 'Things do not go so well (vell). This would have been fine if it just happened once or twice, but after the tenth time, I found it very irritating.
I think the main problem with this book is that it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. There is a love story, two miscarriages of justice, bullying and an escape story - all tied up with the desire to find out what the point of life is. I found that this made it hard to understand the point of the book and left me with a sense of aimlessness. I didn't at any time consider giving it up, but nor was I desperate to pick it up.
On the whole, I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in mental health, particularly from a historical point of view. If all you are looking for is a good read, then I don't think you will find it here. The book is well-written, but the story is just not gripping enough.
If you find the subject area of this book interesting, then you may like Elizabeth Speller's The Sunlight on the Garden: A Family in Love, War and Madness and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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