Asylum by Patrick McGrath

Rating: 3.0

What it's about:
Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Then into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden merely to rebuild an old, Victorian conservatory, but there's an overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man that Stella is powerless to ignore. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes, Stella makes her decision -- one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love.

My thoughts:
Asylum is a slow paced novel about the sexual obsessiveness of Stella and the consequences it has on the lives surrounding hers. I found I cared nothing for the characters and I very much disliked Stella, the main character. It's hard to care much about a book if you don't like the people who inhabit it's pages. Asylum is a slow paced book with not much happening on the outside. The book follows more closely the happenings on the inside of the characters, what they are thinking and feeling emotionally. There are a couple of things about Asylum I like. One is the descriptive scenery, especially when Stella and her husband move to a country house in Wales. The other is when Stella goes to live with the escaped mental patient Edgar (who murdered his wife in a psychotic rampage) and he starts to turn on her. She starts to see the side of Edgar who is imbalanced and brutal and it gives the novel some much needed suspense. Will Stella survive Edgar's psychosis? Can she mend her marriage with Max? Will her 10 year old son Charlie forgive the mother who walked out on their family? This novel is about obsession, guilt, forgiveness and what it truly means to seek asylum.