Case study

A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy. Toward the end of 2019, GMB, a character with the author's initials, receives an email from one Martin Grey, who has in his possession several notebooks he believes GMB might find of interest. Mr. Grey asserts that the notebooks were written by his cousin about Collins Braithwaite, the notorious and now largely forgotten "enfant terrible of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s," on whom GMB has recently published a blog post. According to Grey, the notebooks contain evidence of near-criminal misconduct concerning Braithwaite's involvement in the suicide of the diarist's older sister, Veronica. GMB's research assures him of the notebooks' authenticity, if not their veracity, and he presents their contents verbatim, interspersed with sections of his own outline of Braithwaite's salacious life and ignoble death. From the plinth of this metatextual introduction, the book dives into the "kooky élan" of a thoroughly middle-class young woman--the diarist--as she infiltrates Braithwaite's office under the nom de guerre Rebecca Smyth. Rebecca is bent on uncovering the truth about Braithwaite's therapeutic practice though she's unsure what purpose this truth would serve. However, over the course of the five notebooks, Rebecca's rapid descent into true depression coupled with her increasing difficulty in keeping her original identity separate from her assumed self become the driving narrative. As the novel progresses, the author's layering of his fictional characters' unverifiable testimony, frank deception, and self-aggrandizing half-truths with significant historical figures of the time--like R.D. Laing and Dirk Bogarde--and GMB's omnipresent frame narrative overlap to the extent that it's hard to tell not just whose perception to trust, but which among all these counterfeit identities is real. As beguiling as Rebecca's wry domestic critique can be, the book's star is clearly the carefully constructed unreliability Burnet imbues at every level of his writing. This results in a novel that strives toward the biggest of questions--in the absence of the Cartesian ego Braithwaite seeks to slay, is there anything at all underneath our masks?--but lacks the character-driven empathy that would encourage us to care about the answer. A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The First Notebook I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger, and if proved to be right (a rare occurrence admittedly), this notebook might serve as some kind of evidence. Regrettably, as will become clear, I have little talent for com­position. As I read over my previous sentence I do rather cringe, but if I dilly-dally over style I fear I will never get anywhere. Miss Lyle, my English mistress, used to chide me for trying to cram too many thoughts into a single sentence. This, she said, was a sign of a disorderly mind. 'You must first decide what it is you wish to say, then express it in the plainest terms.' That was her mantra, and though it is doubtless a good one, I can see that I have already failed. I have said that I may be putting myself in danger, but there I go, off on an irrelevant digression. Rather than beginning again, however, I shall press on. What matters here is substance rather than style; that these pages constitute a record of what is to occur. It may be that were my narrative too polished, it might lack credibility; that somehow the ring of truth lies in infelicity. In any case, I cannot follow Miss Lyle's advice, as I do not yet know what it is I wish to say. However, for the sake of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves reading this, I will endeavour to be clear: to express myself in the plainest terms. In this spirit, I shall begin by stating the facts. The danger to which I have alluded comes in the person of Collins Braithwaite. You will have heard him described in the press as 'Britain's most dangerous man', this on account of his ideas about psychiatry. It is my belief, however, that it is not merely his ideas that are dangerous. I am convinced, you see, that Dr Braithwaite killed my sister, Veronica. I do not mean that he murdered her in the normal sense of the word, but that he is, nonetheless, as respon­sible for her death as if he had strangled her with his bare hands. Two years ago, Veronica threw herself from the overpass at Bridge Approach in Camden and was killed by the 4.45 to High Barnet. You could hardly imagine a person less likely to commit such an act. She was twenty-six years old, intelligent, successful and passably attractive. Regardless of this, she had, unbeknown to my father and me, been consulting Dr Braithwaite for some weeks. This I know from his own account. Like most people in England I was familiar with Dr Braithwaite's uncouth Northern drawl long before I encountered him in person. I had heard him speaking on the wireless, and had even once seen him on television. The programme was a discussion of psychiatry hosted by Joan Bakewell.* Braithwaite's appearance was no more attractive than his voice. He wore an open-necked shirt and no jacket. His hair, which reached to his collar, was dishevelled, and he smoked constantly. His features were large, as if they had been exaggerated by a caricaturist, but there was something, even on television, that drew one's eyes to him. I was only vaguely aware of the other guests in the studio. I remember less of what he actually said than his manner of delivering it. He had the air of a man to whom it would be futile to offer resistance. He spoke with a weary authority, as if tired of explaining himself to his inferiors. The participants were seated in a semi-circle with Miss Bakewell in the centre. While the others sat up straight, as if attending church, Dr Braithwaite slouched in his seat like a bored schoolboy, his chin slumped on the palm of his hand. He appeared to regard the other contribu­tors with a mixture of contempt and boredom. Towards the end of the programme, he gathered up his smoking materials and walked off the set, muttering an expletive that there is no need to repeat here. Miss Bakewell was taken aback, but quickly recov­ered her composure and remarked that it was an admission of the poverty of her guest's ideas that he was unwilling to engage in debate with his peers. The following day's newspapers were filled with condemna­tion of Dr Braithwaite's behaviour: he was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modern Britain; his books were filled with the most obscene ideas and displayed the basest view of human nature. Naturally, the following day I visited Foyle's during my lunch hour and asked for a copy of his most recent book, which laboured under the unappealing title of Untherapy. The cashier handled the volume as though it carried the danger of infection, and gave me a disapproving look I had not expe­rienced since I acquired a copy of Mr Lawrence's disreputable novel. My purchase remained under wraps until I was safely ensconced in my room after supper that night. I should say that, prior to this, my knowledge of psychiatry was exclusively derived from those scenes in films in which a patient reclines on a settee and recounts her dreams to a bearded physician with a Germanic accent. Perhaps for this reason, I found the opening part of Untherapy difficult to follow. It was full of unfamiliar words, and the sentences were so long and convoluted that the author would have benefited from follow­ing Miss Lyle's advice. The only thing I gleaned from the intro­duction was that Braithwaite had not even wanted to write this book in the first place. His 'visitors', as he called them, were individuals, not 'case studies' to be paraded like sideshow freaks. If he now set out these stories, it was for the sole purpose of defending his ideas against the scorn poured on them by the Establishment (a word he used a great deal). He declared him­self to be 'an untherapist': his task was to convince people that they did not need therapy; his mission was to bring down the 'jerry-built edifice' of psychiatry. This struck me as a most pecu­liar position to adopt, but, as I have said, I am not well versed in the topic. The book, he wrote, could be seen as a companion to his previous work, and consisted of a series of narratives based on relationships he had entered into with troubled individuals. Naturally, the names and certain identifying details had been changed, but the fundamentals of each story were, he insisted, true. Having got past the baffling opening section, I found these stories frightfully compelling. I suppose there is something reassuring about reading about those duds who make one's own eccentricities pale by comparison. By the time I was half­way through I felt positively normal. It was only when I came to the penultimate chapter that I found myself reading about Veronica. The most sensible thing, I think, is simply to insert these pages here: Excerpted from Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.