Not The TV Show

It's a very passionately written story of a young woman arriving, spitting angry, in the mental health system, and her gradual socialisation. There are some jokes that ring true ("MAD money", the monolithic benefit system for the mentally ill; the names given to the doctors and the drugs evoking the casually hellish, archaic and demonic- "Phlegyapam", "Cerberum", "Dr Diabolus", "Dr Azazel") but too many of them are repeated too often. There's a sense of endless repetition about the book as a whole, which gives it a powerful air of realism- evoking the endless chain of cigarettes, waits for medication, waits for appointments, the predictable and deadening routines of out-patient mental health care. But it is also absolutely exhausting to read, and owes too big a debt to the comedy of Catch 22 and the central conceit of ' One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. I'd like to have read a slightly different novel, that spent more time drawing the environment of the parallel-universe Camden and Chalk Farm, the Darkwoods Estate. This might have given the paranoia-political subplot a world to live in.

I've no idea if the TV version is any good, mind you.