THE GOOD DOCTOR

PATRICK MCGRATH CONFRONTS THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART IN HIS PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILL `ASYLUM'

Author: By Robert Taylor

Date: SUNDAY, February 16, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

The speaker is Dr. Peter Cleave, a psychiatrist in a large mental hospital not far from London. His name has overtones of betrayal (the scriptural Peter) and of a cleaver and joiner of relationships, and he's so starchy and rational the reader may suspect right away that Cleave is that by-now stock figure, the unreliable narrator. But McGrath knows the success of such a narrator in a psychological thriller lies not in his unreliability but in his reliability: You need to accept his initial perceptions or there's no story. On one hand, Cleave would like to run the institution, for he is a 60ish, Machiavellian careerist competing against a younger colleague, Max Raphael, the institution's deputy director and Stella's husband. On the other hand, Cleave faces difficulties with the staff. Stella, whose marriage has gone flat, is embroiled with a patient, Edgar Stark, who is charming, manipulative, sexually charismatic and criminally insane.

Stark, under the delusion that his wife, Ruth, was unfaithful, murdered and beheaded her and then ``enucleated'' her -- scooped out her eyes. He shows no sign of remorse for this atrocity, and seems indifferent to its horror. Stella, though, is a romantic -- ``With Stella it was always the heart, the language of the heart'' -- and her evaluation of Edgar, as the perpetrator of a simple crime of passion, ignores the morbid reality of his past. Futhermore, he is a sculptor, the embodiment of genius, semi-sacred. In ``Asylum,'' romanticism becomes a disease, and love and the idealization of the lover kindle tragedy. All for love may be Stella's conviction, but from a medical standpoint she's as sick as Edgar.

One admires the resource with which McGrath faces the novel's main problem, making the reader sympathize with Stella. To begin with, she is beautiful, respectable, affluent, outgoing and intelligent. She has a 10-year-old son named Charlie. What she woefully lacks is judgment.

Lending plausibility to the sexual obsession of Stella and Edgar is the dry clinical voice of Cleave. Not that he is trustworthy; in fact, he is as manipulative as his patient. His falsely affable and sympathetic comments take on a wheedling hypocrisy. Nonetheless, Cleave's voice acts as a good narrative filter: He supplies the psychiatrist's version of Edgar, which Stella rejects. Cleave isn't besotted by passion like Stella, and he isn't plagued by jealousy like Edgar, so it's possible to follow his self-serving version of events without too much distortion.

The novel begins at a hospital dance in 1959 and closes upon the same dance a year afterward. Within that frame the pace never slackens. Stella and Max have just arrived at the hospital; they belong to a ruling caste, and it is instructive how the major characters respond to each other at first meeting.

What harm was there in befriending a patient, Stella thinks, notwithstanding the patient's arousal at the hospital ball, when he had asked her to dance and boldly pressed against her. For Max, Edgar belongs among the paroled patients, anonymous but helpful, working on the restoration of an ornate Victorian greenhouse. Dr. Cleave, defining turf, typically remarks, ``Edgar was one of mine. . . . He and I quickly came to enjoy a warmly combative relationship.'' As for Edgar? ``He claimed to have a wealth of evidence of Ruth's infidelity, but when asked for it he produced only trivial everyday occurrences, into which he read bizarre, extravagant meanings. A flushing toilet, a stain on the floor, the placement of a box of washing powder on a windowsill, these were the sorts of things that signified. He had otherwise fully recovered his sanity and was ready to be released, but he remained on this one point unshakable, that the murder was justified.''

The suspense, of course, resides in our perception of Edgar as a lunatic, while Stella reveres him as an artist. He hasn't recovered his sanity; his inability to see his models truly indicates his mental confusion. She doesn't care. It is not long before they are making love on the Raphaels' marital bed; Edgar steals Max's clothes (the men are the same size) and absconds. Discovering the theft, Max hesitates to report it -- acknowledging Stella's adultery -- and ruins his career. Shortly thereafter, Stella abandons her husband and son to join Edgar in a squalid London loft, and the maelstrom of obsessive sexuality begins to spin faster and faster.

The plot could have been a schematic descent into nightmare, but McGrath's sensuous prose rescues it from contrivance. His work displays a provocative ambivalence -- like the title of the novel itself, which denotes both a place of refuge and a prison. At this writing, ``Asylum'' is destined to become a movie, a medium that will have to solve the problem of a story dependent on dramatizing inner feelings. All the same, the action and conflict ought to guarantee success. What a pity Cary Grant, the ideal image of surface charm and subterranean tumult, isn't around to play Edgar.