Bedlam

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An International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award NomineeA Toronto Globe and Mail Best Book of the YearConspiracies, plots, and paranoia are sweeping through London in the last days of the eighteenth century, and James Tilly Matthews has been caught under false pretenses and locked up in the city's vast, crumbling asylum. As his wife, Margaret, tries desperately to free him, political forces conspire to keep him locked up. Margaret's chief adversary is John Haslam, the asylum's chief apothecary, a man torn between his conscience and the lure of scientific discovery: as James becomes more famous--and more unhinged--he becomes a valuable specimen for the young doctor and a pawn in a grand political conspiracy. Based on real characters and events, Bedlam is a brilliant evocation of a city teetering between darkness and light, and a moving study of every kind of madness.From Publishers WeeklyCanadian Hollingshead (The Roaring Girl) offers a sprawling story based on a contentious historical episode. In 1797, James Tilly Matthews was committed to Bethlem (aka Bedlam), the notorious British lunatic asylum, after nattering on about an "air loom" machine used by villains to control people. But there was more to it; Matthews claimed he was being punished for going on a peace mission to France during the Revolution. Certainly his confinement had not been ordered by John Haslam, the Bethlem apothecary who treated him, nor by his wife, Margaret, who tried for nearly 20 years to have him released. Hollingshead deploys all three as narrators of this fictionalized account: Matthews, who slips in and out of lucidity; Mrs. Matthews, singleminded (and therefore largely uninteresting); and Haslam, whose use of Matthews as a research subject makes his motives suspect. Hollingshead's language slides between the centuries as he tangles with provocative themes: the causes and treatments of mental illness, the battle between service and self-interest in the doctor/scientist, and the ways mad members of society can reflect the chaos of the world outside. A vivid picture of the grotesque patients and sadistic staff of the "English Bastille" adds density to the gallows humor that peppers this brutal story. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Superbly disturbing . . . a profoundly moving examination of both mental and political lunacy."--The Boston Globe"Bedlam has no end of gorgeous writing . . . elegant, heartfelt . . . filled with rewarding descriptions of a bygone era."--The New York Times Book Review"A vivid picture of the grotesque patients and sadistic staff of the 'English Bastille' adds density to the gallows humor that peppers this brutal story."--Publishers Weekly "Stylishly written, full of dazzling, epigrammatic insights . . . An intellectual novel, but also a moving story about fully fleshed human beings."--The Globe and Mail (Toronto)