Those who enjoyed the recent movie Identity
should enjoy Shutter Island. 
Both are works in a well-worn genre with a slant of mental illness and
the twisted mind of one of the characters. 
And both are cleverly plotted, but sacrifice a realistic picture of
mental illness in order to achieve dramatic effect. 

It is the middle of the 1950s and
US Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule arrive at the
Aschcliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, on remote Shutter Island.  Their mission is to investigate a missing
patient who has mysteriously disappeared from a locked room.  Daniels was a hero during the World War II,
and killed hundreds of the enemy.  He
saw terrible sights, especially in the liberation of a concentration camp.  Not only is he coping with those terrible
memories, but he is also haunted by the death of his wife in a fire, set by an
arsonist.  It turns out that the
arsonist, Andrew Laeddis, is one of the patients at the hospital, and Daniels
wants revenge.  However, the people in
charge of the hospital are not cooperating with the detectives, and indeed they
seem to be doing everything they can to interfere with the investigation.

Shutter Island can be a
testing experience in reading because there are occasional points where the
narrative seems to have gaps, leaving the reader confused.  For the most part, though, the novel moves
along quickly and the mysteries unfold to reveal even deeper mysteries.  The story is narrated in the third-person,
but the narrator follows Daniels for every moment of the story, and the reader
starts to see what is going through his head. 
One of the central ideas of the book concerns the new psychiatric
treatments being tested at the time, including the new psychotropic
medications, and this will be particularly interesting to those familiar with
the history of psychiatry.  Readers who
are offended by sensationalist appropriation of mental illness will probably
find Lahane’s novel problematic (in much the same way that Identity is flawed).  However, those simply looking to enjoy a
carefully constructed mystery thriller set in a psychiatric hospital for whom
an accurate depiction of mental illness in fiction is not so important should
find Shutter Island very satisfying. 

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on philosophical
issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction