Experienced therapist threatened by own issues
THE THERAPIST
Hugh Mackay
Sixtysevenyearold Martha Elliott is an experienced psychotherapist practising in Sydney, Australia. We see her work with a series of clients, who bring to her room a range of personal issues related to their experiences of the urban West in the twentyfirst century: the loneliness of the aged, gender balance problems in the marriages of the professional classes, the responsibilities of paternity and the frictions of codependency, among others.
The flow of her welloiled routine is shattered by the appearance of a supposed client, Abigail Orton, who questions Martha’s integrity; relating to an affair Martha had ten years previously with Giles Dubois, now the wife of Abigail’s identical twin sister. As a result of this crisis, Martha decides to retire.
So much for the plot. However, the novel, in using a range of characters to typify the personal issues dogging Western urban society, makes the book read, at times, more like a docudrama than a work of fiction.
It is Abigail’s intervention that threatens to turn the smooth life of Martha into a surreal nightmare and the novel into altogether darker realms, especially when we are given the backstory of Martha’s affair with the scarcely believable and absent Dubois, present only in the report of others.
In addition, the reader becomes aware of the plot organising a series of happy endings while writing out Abigail, Dubois and the threat of exposure of Martha as a flawed therapist.
Is Martha’s integrity undermined? Is she a victim or a heroine? The novel both presents and then evades the central issues.
Think what Dostoevsky or Peter Carey could make of these ingredients!