Product Description

As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession.' His experience is extensive, and he is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on such an affair...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25110 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Patrick McGrath is the author of THE GROTESQUE, SPIDER, DR HAGGARD'S DISEASE and BLOOD AND WATER AND OTHER TALES all of which have attracted widespread critical acclaim. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

A Love Story as it should be
This is one of the most engaging and gripping reads I have ever come across. McGrath has an incredible skill of drawing the reader into a false sense of security before cruelly creating the some of the darkest and most depressing scenes in modern literature. Stella is a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a longing for passion. She finds it in Edgar, an articulate and seemingly sane prisoner of an Asylum. The book is woven in an unsentimental and stark, often harsh format by a psychiatrist. This clever viewpoint allows the book to maintain a raw and very real feel throughout. The disturbing nature of the book and its haunting characters played on my mind for many months afterwards. I would recommend it to anyone who simply has a love of words and love stories in their original, tragic structures...

Captivating
This is a gothic love story, set in a mental asylum, that at first look I thought was going to be too depressing to read. How wrong I was. McGrath really drew me in with his dark, but captivating writing style. From the beginning it's clear that this story is going to end tragically, but the writing is pacey enough to keep the reader hooked.

The book is about Stella who lives with her psychiatrist husband Max and a young son called Charlie, in the grounds of a high-security mental hospital. She is very unhappy with her life and embarks on a romance with Edgar; one of the inmates who she later discovers murdered his wife and mutilated her body whilst in a jealous rage. Nevertheless, she becomes obsessed by Edgar, and starts on a course of actions that ultimately lead to a harrowing tragedy.

This novel shows the darker side of love and the extremes of behaviour that can arise from it. A captivating read that was a true page-turner for me.

Disturbing and compelling
Haunting, compellingly written, Asylum tells the story of Stella Raphael, the beautiful, impressionable young wife of Max, a forensic psychiatrist at a well-respected psychiatric institution outside of London. Unlike some fictional "unhappy wives", Stella is not a foolish heroine; in fact she is intelligent, perceptive, and quite well-versed in her husband's metier, a fact which will serve her well later in the story.

Compelled by a powerful mix of physical attraction, unfulfilled ambitions, and fascination with the world outside her marriage, she embarks on a dangerous affair with a mental patient, Edgar Stark. It is a tribute to McGrath's art that you never question for one moment how it happens or why, to our horror, she continues it, despite the dreadful consequences. In fact, you find yourself almost understanding her compulsion, wondering whether you would be able to do any better than she does in the end.

But the real villian in the story may not be the frightening Edgar, nor Stella, but the narrator himself. Ostensibly a dispassionate observer - a fellow psychiatrist in the Raphaels' circle - you find yourself wondering, as the story unfolds, what is the real truth about what happened to Stella? Who is deceiving whom? And finally, who and what has finally been manipulated?

Asylum has been described as a Gothic novel. I disagree. Gothic novels are filled with spooky references to ancient horrors that may or may not be real. Asylum, on the other hand, is all too real. The fact that there are no sleights-of-hand in it; the reluctant understanding that Stella's situation, although it may be extreme, is all too possible, is what makes this novel the beautiful and disturbing piece of literature that it is.