In
1920 a poet, David Goodchild, is taken by his mother to an institution in Derbyshire
run by an American psychiatrist, Clive Penn and his wife Mary. It was intended that David should be a houseguest initially, and thereafter a patient, because his mind had been damaged by the war. Dr Penn liked the idea
of treating a poet: perhaps they could unravel the
psychopathology of poetry. And Mary liked the idea even more: she had always
wanted a poet. She invited David into her sitting room while Dr Penn visited his other patients. Mary grew fond of David.
It was a time when psychiatry was just emerging and for Mary to have married a psychiatrist was considered 'modern'; to have married an American psychiatrist even more so. Yet it was Mary who tried to prevent her husband from integrating his patients into the village - who warned him that what was normal on the Western Front, or what was fashionable in Vienna and London did not necessarily hold in Derbyshire. Just because the doctor had not heard the words 'cowardice' or 'lunatic' did not mean they weren't lurking behind a British reserve he hadn't quite fathomed. Mary's words were prophetic.
Through his deeply affecting narrative, Richard Burns leads us into a compelling investigation of the personal consequences of war - when the fear and danger an individual has lived through leave no alternative but retreat into a form of mental disorder. He has sympathetically and memorably portrays Goodchild as a poet, Georgian at heart, who cannot face modernity and, even less, the stigma of failure in the ghastly arena of combat he never wished to enter.
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