Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates

 Joyce Carol Oates has to be a living literary phenomenon.   I have been following her work for over fifty years and she is still going strong, still getting better and better.   Butcher is as recent as 2024.   How could she possibly bring herself to undertake a massive task like this?   In her stride seems to be the answer.

She has never been better.   It is as if the awfulness of her subject matter (the early, gruesome years of male physicians' attempts to understand women's minds and bodies) spurs Oates on to greater heights.  Dr Silas Aloysius Weir, who until 1851 had been repulsed by women's gynological processes, finds himself the director of the Women's Lunatic Asylum in Trenton New Jersey.   Eager to make a name for himself he experiments on the women supposedly in his care and so builds himself a national reputation as the Father of Gyno-Psychiatry.   I know from my own research how close Oates's Weir comes to the ghastly truth; frankly, it continues today with so-called specialists needlessly mutilating women for no other reason I can fathom save sadism and mysogyny.   

Ten years on, Weir's patients strike back.   For a man, these scenes are equally horrific, but for a (hopefully) balanced man, you have to say it's deserved.   And yet I was quite moved with Oates's depiction of Weir in his later years - retired, reclusive, refusing to discuss what happened and flatly disclaiming any knowledge of who was responsible (although we know that he knows).   I found this a masterful and at the same time compassionate use of dramatic irony.   Oates never at any stage loses sight of the humanity of any of her characters (which, of course, is precisely what Weir has done with his patients).

A modern masterpiece but not for the fainthearted.

In Matto's Realm - Friedrich Glauser

 

A real discovery!  Friedrich Glauser (1896-1938) is called the Swiss Simenon but is far more interesting.  Here, he sets his story in a Psychiatric Clinic - the director has gone missing as has one of his patients, a self-confessed child killer.  For most writers this would mean a great deal of painful research.  Not for Glauser, a schizophrenic who had spent long periods of time in such clinics.  On top of that he was addicted to morphine and opium, had done time for forging prescriptions, and had served in the Foreign Legion.  He wasn't even Swiss - he was born in Vienna.

So what does a madman make of the madhouse?  He of course has great sympathy for the patients, but also the staff.  The most compelling character in the novel is Dr Ernst Laduner, the deputy director, who has a smile that looks like it's been pasted on, eccentric verbal tics and a taste for sometimes brutal experimentation.  And then there's Glauser's series detective, Sergeant Jakob Studer, formerly an inspector but busted back to sergeant, aged fifty, by his bete noir Colonel Caplaun, whose alcoholic son just happens to be a patient of Dr Laduner.

The story grips like a vice.  We become fully conversant with this alien world and its inhabitants.  The year is 1936.  In Germany radical events are underway but all we hear of them is an unidentified voice ranting on the radio.  This is clearly Hitler, who would have no toleration whatsoever for someone like Glauser.  And this is Glauser's genius - we have to work these things out for ourselves, though we are left in no doubt about Studer's antipathetic views on fascism.  Indeed, Studer does many things we might not expect of a heavily-built German-speaking cop coming up to retirement.

It's a thrilling, fascinating and in many ways beautiful book.  At this halfway stage of the year, it's my favourite read of 2021.