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A review by jane_davis
Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught
5.0
Those marvellous people at Bluemoose Books have an uncanny knack for spotting the genius of quirky gems, and this novel is no exception. I started reading with no preconceptions, unsure if what I was reading was magical realism. It didn’t matter. I was quickly captivated by the strength of the writing and happy to ‘trust’ the book’s narrator, Lucia, daughter of James Joyce.
The cast of characters should be enough to temp you: together with Lucia, there is The Honourable Violet Gibson, whose 1926 attempt to assassinate Mussolini failed; Anna O, who helped Freud develop his theory of psychoanalysis because of what she herself called The Talking Care; finally Blanche Whittman, a patient at the Salpêtrière, Paris, known as the ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ and used by Charcot, then, one of the most famous doctors in the world, to demonstrate the effects of hypnosis.
The fact that our narrator is a resident of St Andrew’s psychiatric hospital means that she has the potential to be the ultimate unreliable witness. She is clearly struggling to manage her churning thoughts, obsessions and compulsions (this often disrupts the narrative), but there is also clarity of thought (the sanity within the madness), friendship and moments of sheer joy. Of the underlying questions the book explores, perhaps one of the most significant is who defines madness and who gets to judge that someone else is mad? Was Violet Gibson any madder than Mussolini, or the mediums who conducted the séance the four attend, for example? The most poignant question, however, that the four have to grapple with is why family and friends – the people they thought loved them, the people they trusted – have apparently abandoned them.
If the author had given me speech marks (and I do think the book needed them), I’d have been a very happy bunny indeed.
The cast of characters should be enough to temp you: together with Lucia, there is The Honourable Violet Gibson, whose 1926 attempt to assassinate Mussolini failed; Anna O, who helped Freud develop his theory of psychoanalysis because of what she herself called The Talking Care; finally Blanche Whittman, a patient at the Salpêtrière, Paris, known as the ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ and used by Charcot, then, one of the most famous doctors in the world, to demonstrate the effects of hypnosis.
The fact that our narrator is a resident of St Andrew’s psychiatric hospital means that she has the potential to be the ultimate unreliable witness. She is clearly struggling to manage her churning thoughts, obsessions and compulsions (this often disrupts the narrative), but there is also clarity of thought (the sanity within the madness), friendship and moments of sheer joy. Of the underlying questions the book explores, perhaps one of the most significant is who defines madness and who gets to judge that someone else is mad? Was Violet Gibson any madder than Mussolini, or the mediums who conducted the séance the four attend, for example? The most poignant question, however, that the four have to grapple with is why family and friends – the people they thought loved them, the people they trusted – have apparently abandoned them.
If the author had given me speech marks (and I do think the book needed them), I’d have been a very happy bunny indeed.