Rebecca Smyth goes to a psychiatrist. So far, everything normal. But don't be fooled: what happens is that she suspects that the therapist – the anti-psychiatry guru Arthur Collins Braithwaite – induced her sister, who was dealing with him, to commit suicide. Clinical case (Impedimenta), by the Scotsman Graeme Macrae Burnet (Kilmarnock, 1967), is one of the revelations of this literary year, a thriller set in the psychedelic London of the sixties that mixes suspense, psychological tension (which is established, as a mental chess, between patient and doctor) and reflects on the limits of sanity and the nature of identity. Taking advantage of the fact that the author has come to Barcelona to watch a Barça match at the Camp Nou (“you also have a Braithwaite, a very common surname in the north of England”), this newspaper spoke with him on a terrace in the Gothic quarter.
Author of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), the first installment of his police trilogy set in the small Alsatian town of Saint Louis, Burnet was a Booker finalist in 2016 with A Bloody Plan, where he recounts, as if it were a documentary, everything that surrounds to a triple murder in the Highlands in the mid-19th century. Clinical case begins with the author studying in 2020 the controversy surrounding the methods of Braithwaite (the psychiatrist), based on his research on him and the diaries that Rebecca Smyth wrote (in reality, she was not called that but is the false identity that she adopted to be treated by the guy).
"I try not to be a mechanic, not to repeat what I have already done," he explains. But then I look at my books and the narrators or protagonists are always neurotic or paranoid or repressed…maybe Rebecca is the feminine and more glamorous version of that same character, maybe they are all various versions of me. The important thing is that the reader is disturbed”.
Identity, duality... the book deals with philosophical issues, but it is a thriller. “We all have different identities. Right now I am adopting the role of a writer, I act as a writer in front of you, who pretends to be a journalist, but if I go with my friends to the pub I will play another role, more histrionic. I am many, and you do not say”. “I want people to get hooked on the book –he proclaims–, on the minds of these two characters, on the intrigue. I want them to feel that this is a very easy to read and accessible book, but one that also has intellectual weight. I don't see any contradiction between entertaining yourself and going deep intellectually."
He has read, above all, “many clinical cases of Freud – who was justly nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well, he was a great author of fiction– or R.D. Laing –which appears in the plot–, as well as women's magazines of the time. I read academic texts about how there are people capable of adopting the identity of another person, guys who are fakes, in a way. Anti-psychiatry, he continues, “questioned the power structures of psychiatry. He showed that there is always a truth, even a psychotic realizes what is not right, according to their values. Anti-psychiatry opposed the barbaric practice of electroshock therapy, then usual, as it was used for psychotics, schizophrenics, and bipolars, causing more disorders. Current psychotherapy takes quite a few ideas from that anti-psychiatry, for example avoiding diagnosing, pathologizing or mislabeling a lot of people”.
Braithwaite “is a provocateur, eccentric, he says that everything is true, that there are no ideas superior to others. He is a disciple of the liberal Isaiah Berlin, very educated, he understands French wines and cinema, he has gone to Oxford, he has traveled”. Cultural references dot the pages of the novel, both literary and musical or cinematographic, with the appearance of Claude Chabrol and Dirk Bogarde included. In fact, he points out, “Bogarde fit the theme of the novel very well: a Hollywood heartthrob, closet homosexual, and female idol. I do not criticize him because it was very difficult to accept that in the 70s and 80s, in him there was a very interesting confrontation between his private and public life.
Braithwaite is fascinated by actors “because they go out of their way to be other people, and the more they are, the more applause they get. In Glasgow, I also go to the theater a lot and go to the bar after the performance, to chat with the performers. Braithwaite “has charisma, he enjoys it and exercises it, it's something that can help but it can also be dangerous because you make people do things they normally wouldn't do. Says Rebecca: 'I felt like he could steer me in any direction he wanted, it was exciting.' He works in love and also in politics, which is why charismatic leaders are the most dangerous.”
Its narrator is one of those that literary critics call "unreliable." “Aren't they all really? She," she replies quickly, "not just mine, but all the narrators of all the books. In the first person we see more clearly that the truth is only one version of things, but it is also in the third person! The reader is an adult and must decide if he trusts her. I don't really know what to advise him. The reader is the detective, not me.
Some powerful images stick in the memory, like that of a girl using the reins in a unique way. "They never asked me that but the thing about the reins comes from my mother using them with me when I was a child." How? Did she tie her up? “Isn't that normal in Spain? I thought that...wow, I know more children whose parents were held like this, tied with a flexible tape, which allowed them to move but with limited freedom, I remember that feeling perfectly”.
