An examined life

Sandy Grey's father is the kind of Christian preacher who believes you can wash away someone's sins with a stiff brush and soap - as long as you scrub until they bleed. Set in Canada after the outbreak of the Second World War, this haunting, intense novel begins with 19-year-old Grey being committed to an asylum for the criminally insane after apparently attacking his father with a tyre jack.

Inside the asylum Grey is treated kindly by the well-meaning Dr Frank, whose devotion to psychoanalysis means that Grey avoids the drugs and surgery that have wrecked the minds of many other inmates. As time passes, however, Dr Frank comes under pressure to obtain measurable results, and Grey suffers. Little details spell out the way the institutional ethos starts to shift - the disappearance of Frank's books on Jung, for example.

Grey makes friends, such as Karl, a pacifist German writer who was locked up for setting free caged birds when war was declared. He also makes powerful enemies, such as Cooper, a bigoted attendant whose unrestrained violence twice changes the course of Grey's life.

Karl tells Grey that the only way he'll ever leave the institution is by presenting Frank with a logical story which shows he can be rehabilitated. Unable to talk about his own life, Grey instead investigates the case of a young man he believes was wrongly hanged in the hospital when it used to be a prison, and tries to prove his own innocence by analogy.

Although not as harrowing or bitterly intelligent as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest this book has its own unique strengths, not least the final message of hope. It may be a little- too starry eyed, but it's a novel to get lost in.

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