Book Review by K.S.Loganathan
Orion ,2019
Alex Michaelides is a British-Cypriot screenwriter.His debut novel ‘The Silent Patient’ is a longish psychological mystery novel set in present day London.
Michaelides had worked in a secure psychiatric facility for teenagers and he chose a psychotherapist instead of a detective, to tell the story of Alicia Berenson, an artist, who shoots dead her husband of seven years Gabriel, a well-known fashion photographer. She then cuts across the veins in her wrists but survives. When under house arrest, she paints a self-portrait she calls’ Alcestis’, after a character in a Greek play by Euripides. Alcestis volunteers to die for her husband but is resurrected and reunited with him: she does not speak again. In like fashion, Alicia too remains the silent patient when moved to a psychiatric facility in confinement. After six years an interlocutor arrives at the hospital to get her to talk.
It is not the classical whodunit mystery, but the author melds elements of an early Agatha Christie mystery and the Greek tragedy (with which the author is familiar) with a deeper psychological complexity in a modern context. The book is a bestseller and is being developed into a film by Brad Pitt’s production company.
My Views
The choice of a psychiatric facility , the small number of suspects and a psychotherapist as a narrator all serve to limit the extent of the mystery involved- to what happened on that fateful night- and the reason why Alicia’s silence is significant. In a typical Christie mystery the reader is always trying to guess the motive ,means and opportunity for each of the many suspects to commit murder ; the detective and the police are working to solve the crime; readers of all ages can attempt to solve the mystery; Christie usually throws suspicion all around, and quickens the pace towards the end ,with a dramatic flourish in the penultimate chapter ; justice is meted out. The whole caboodle is lacking in this novel, although the twist at the end is unexpected.
In my opinion , as the author (himself a scriptwriter) has stated in an interview ,the silence will be extremely challenging to capture in a film. It is challenging too in the book, but is handled by the author reasonably well for a debut novel and his foray into longform writing. Remember that Euripides closes, and not begins , his play with the silence , unlike the author. However some mystery fans may find the psychiatric ward setting and inmate behavior disturbing.
