Description
"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."--James Joyce, Ulysses Umbrella , the latest novel by the cuttingly intelligent Will Self, arcs between pre-World-War-I London and a mental hospital in 1971. The title refers to a recurring motif in the book, which appears most notably in the sections that take place at the mental hospital, where the nurses call for an "umbrella" when they need to inject a patient with a sedative. The book challenges the institutional treatment of the mentally ill from the Victorian asylums to the "care in the community" that is the touchstone of contemporary mental health care. Umbrella is a complex narrative peppered with Self's wit, dark humor, and stylistic idiosyncrasies. The work is written as a single uninterrupted stream of narrative, without any chapter breaks and with paragraph breaks only rarely. The book is told in the third person, but includes italicized lines in many sentences that relay the characters' thoughts or speech. The setting shifts between a coherently advancing central plot in one timeframe and flashbacks/memories of earlier periods in some of the characters' lives, which initially makes for a (deliberately) disconcerting reading experience. However, as the reader becomes more familiar with this narrative strategy, the changes in narrative perspective become second nature. This shift in narration, far from alienating the reader, keeps the book's narrative in constant flux, and makes the work gripping and engaging. The book's protagonist is ZACHARY BUSNER, known to Will's fans from his appearances in Great Apes , The Quantity Theory of Insanity , and other books. Busner works as a psychiatrist at a mental hospital in London's northern suburb of Friern Barnet. The time period in which the book is set is not immediately apparent, but it can be worked out as 1971. Busner is a complex character: hardened by his career, indifferent to his wife, and rather self-absorbed, he nonetheless takes his duties as a psychiatrist very seriously and attempts to analyze and determine the underlying pathologies of his patients. As he tours the ward of the hospital at which he has recently begun working, he notes a group of patients who exhibit a very peculiar type of physical tic: extremely quick but very precise movements, that seem to be very controlled in nature. These patients are extremely mentally unconscious--they do not react to outside stimuli and are trapped inside an internal world. Their atypical symptoms arouse his interest. One such patient is Audrey Death (variously De'ath, Dearth), who is an elderly woman, born in 1890 in Fulham, in south-west London. Through a narrative that slips into Audrey's mind and recounts her memories in the present tense, the reader learns that Audrey is one of five children; her father SAM is a gambler and small-time businessman, and her mother MARY JANE, a housewife--both are native Londoners, and much of their speech is written in a Cockney dialect. Audrey lives with her sister ADELINE, and her brothers, including STANLEY and ALBERT, the latter of whom is extremely intelligent, and is given patronage by a gentleman, who, it is suggested, is interested in Albert not only for reasons of philanthropy. Lines of Cockney songs mix with descriptions of a bygone London, where horse-drawn buses roamed the streets, and costermongers dotted every corner, selling food, household goods, and so on. The vivid, bustling, lively London of Audrey's memories contrasts absolutely with the clinical, institutional mental hospital in the central narrative. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that Busner himself seems to hear voices in his head, or at least become fixated on certain phrases, snatches of songs or poetry, which echo in his mind. His closest associate at the hospital is a nurse of Kenyan origin, called Mboya--he is calm, knowledgeable, and hardworking. Busner and Mboya investigate Audrey Death and the other patients who are exhibiting strangely precise, most of whom have been incarcerated in the hospital since the 1930s. Busner looks into Audrey's records and goes to meet the psychiatrist who was in charge of the hospital before he arrived, DR. MARCUS. Dr. Marcus tells Busner something which he already suspected: that Audrey and the other patients on the ward whose strange behavior Busner has noted, are not suffering from mental illness per se, but from the after effects of encephalitis--brain fever. They were hospitalized following an outbreak of viral encephalitis, exhibiting symptoms initially thought of as indicative of schizophrenia or the catch-all diagnosis of 'hysteria'. Dr. Marcus tells Busner of how they probably would have endured sexual advances, possibly rape, from their former warders, and how they would have initially been sedated with opium and even henbane, the use of which was common at the time. Schizophrenics were given sex hormones, and patients at one point had to wear colored cards around their necks if they
