Asylum’s tone and narrative style are decidedly Gothic. It is the tale of an asylum psychiatrist’s wife, and her affair with a mad, murdering sculptor. Asylum bred an odd sense of unease within me. I wasn’t sure whom to trust. The narrator made me uncomfortable. The wife, Stella, was unsympathetically needy. Her husband was very grey, and placed in the background, so we could feel as little for him as did Stella. The sculptor, Edgar Stark, was presented for the first half of the book as a sexual object, a fascinating, appealingly forbidden creature whom this itchy Stella could have; in the second half, he was revealed to be just as jealous and conniving as he had been when he had murdered his previous lover.
The character in the book who should have aroused the most sympathy is Charlie, Stella’s young son, but even he was relegated to the dank upstairs, leaving us no choice but to ride along in Stella’s libido. McGrath does an excellent job of forcing us to identify with Stella by positioning the other characters just out of grasp. His style is wry and world-weary, extremely British, with wonderful lines such as, "The truth is, the mentally ill are not at their best at a dance." There are levels of removal and caste throughout the novel: our main characters are the sane inhabitants of an asylum, a handful of people living among humans with whom they can barely communicate.
Stella, in her role as a senior psychiatrist’s wife, is expected to be one of the most stable occupants of the asylum grounds; as she romanticizes her solitude and descends into lovelorn madness, she undergoes a sequence of reversals, trying so hard to live by her heart that she sustains her freedom with rigidity. Stark is both the impetus for and reflection of her attempt at freedom: less a character himself than a symptom of her own perceived entrapment.
I was frustrated by this book; I wanted to throttle Stella and tell her to get a spine, but I was also miserably fascinated by her. This is not a friendly novel.