Damaged psyches drive moody thriller
Theo Faber is a British psychotherapist with more than his share of problems.
“We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged — we study psychology to heal ourselves,” he says.
In midlife, married and with an established career caring for the criminally insane, Theo becomes obsessed with another, even more damaged individual.
Alicia Berenson, a famous painter married to a fashion photographer and living in London, has been institutionalized after killing her husband, shooting him five times in the face for no apparent reason. She hasn’t spoken a word since. The sole clue she leaves is a self-portrait done shortly after the murder, showing her covered with blood and titled “Alcestis.”
The moody, slow-simmering debut psychological thriller by screenwriter Alex Michaelides sets up a catand-mouse game between the two that is all the more impressive considering one is nonverbal.
Theo, who narrates the majority of the novel and shapes the way the reader sees events, is fascinated enough with Alicia’s case to get a job at the foundering experimental institution where she is being held, drugged to the max.
He persuades the remarkably pliant head of the institution, Dr. Diomedes, to cut back on her medications, with predictably dramatic results.
He also engages in some decidedly unprofessional sleuthing, meeting up with Alicia’s reluctant family members to get a sense of her personality and her past.
Michaelides has a light touch with the references to Greek myths that pepper the novel, adding subtle flavor without distracting from the sinuous movement of the plot.
Short, punchy chapters add new angles to a constantly evolving plot, and the author nicely balances a Gothic atmosphere with sharp descriptions of a large cast of suspicious characters — lawyers, unstable aunts, violent inmates, sketchy nurses, ambitious doctors.
The increasingly unhinged Theo alternates the story of his journey into Alicia’s psyche, or some version of it, with an account of his own unraveling marriage to actress Kathy, who is rehearsing “Othello,” and spending a lot of unexplained time away from home.
Although the novel has a harrowing twist at the end, one that reverberates back through the narrative that proceeded it, it doesn’t depend on that twist to keep the reader engaged.
Like most thrillers, it does require the reader to make some concessions to the form. The Grove, where Alicia is held, has the seedy allure of an institution out of some 19th-century novel. And, speaking practically, it seems unlikely both that someone just convicted of murder would be housed there, and that the number of weapons she and the few other patients seem to regularly make or find wouldn’t throw up a few red flags.
Michaelides also makes the choice to have Alicia keep a secret diary — secret to everyone but the novel’s readers — for a few months before the murder, a diary complete with fully transcribed passages of dialogue. Some might consider this cheating; it certainly makes Michaelides’ job as an author easier.
Readers who can get by these obstacles, however, are in for a breathless ride.
margaretquamme@hotmail.