Asylum for the damned

THE story of Stella Raphael is "one of the saddest I know", announces the narrator at the outset of Patrick McGrath's Asylum (Viking, £16 in UK). The opening paragraph, echoing Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, sets the scene for much of what is to follow.

Stella is the wife of Max, a forensic psychiatrist. He is, according to the narrator, "a reserved, rather melancholy man, a confident administrator, but weak; and he lacked imagination". The narrator tellingly adds: "I was obvious to me the first time I met them that he wasn't the type to satisfy a woman like Stella."

More ease history than story, the narrative, with its detached tone, seems at first organised, deliberate and clinical. "The catastrophic love affair characterised by sexual obsession has been a professional interest of mine for many years now, the narrator says at the outset. "Such relationships vary widely in duration and intensity but tend to pass through the same stages. Recognition. Identification. Assignation. Structure. Complication. And so on." It is as if he is dividing the various movements of his tale into the acts of a play. Stella is described in a loaded first paragraph as "a deeply frustrated woman" and also as "a romantic" guilty of translating her experience with Edgar Stark "into the stuff of melodrama". McGrath's narrator immediately betrays the fact that it is he, rather than the unfortunate Stella, who has taken this sad story and intellectualised and dramatised it beyond the experience of those who lived it.

Although it is set in the 1950s, the book has a curiously 19th century feel to it. Even the names - Stella, Max, Edgar Stark - could be the names in a Victorian love triangle; only the costumes are missing. The narrator's language is precise, formal yet charged with unsettling and clearly obsessive undertones. Though he is telling Stella's story he is also revealing much of himself. Early in his account he speaks of the mental hospital where both he and Stella's husband worked and where he - the narrator - still does: "This is a desolate sort of place, though god knows it's had the best years of my life."

Max is the Deputy Superintendent, and for all his alleged lack of imagination, appears to have quickly decided to colonise "the large, dark house" which he, his wife Stella and son Charlie moved into when he took up his new post, an appointment which the narrator informs us he had opposed. Inevitably the reader wonders why we being told so much, so soon. The voyeuristic narrator, we realise, is insane. We know what is going to happen.

Max, the man of no imagination, sets out to restore an endangered Victorian conservatory in the adjoining vegetable garden. Among the patients is one skilled enough to save the decaying Structure, the sculptor Edward Stark, who is the narrator's patient. As early as the third page, it is apparent that bored, frustrated Stella became involved with a psychiatric patient who happens to be an established artist - Edward Stark, of course. Aside from her unhappiness, Stella is beautiful, intelligent and lively, a fact the narrator returns to so often that it becomes a refrain. This is irritating, as Stella never emerges as the intelligent woman we are so repeatedly told she is.

The artificiality of the narrative is the central weakness of Asylum. McGrath is a very good in fact, a superb writer. His first novel, The Grotesque (1989), is a hilarious black romp in which the central character is a watcher who can't speak, yet misses none of the crazy goings on in the large, gothic manor house the characters are all trapped in. That book was followed by Spider (1991), a startling, often moving portrait of a split personality. Dr Haggard's Disease (1993) turned to obsessive love, and while McGrath's prose remained as chillingly beautiful and deliberate as in his first two novels, this one showed a dangerous narrowing of range and focus, and raised the possibility that McGrath would become artistically caught in a small world of obsessive extremes. Asylum confirms this. Of course, Edgar not only murdered his wife, he decapitated her and then gouged her eyes out, all because he suspected her of betraying him. Details such as this don't bother Stella. The couple engage in a form of sexuality which negates conversation. Stella is lured time and again into wilder, more improbable feats of defiant risk taking, defying her husband, her son, her formidable and far from stupid mother in law, as well as society itself, not forgetting her own common sense and self preservation.

The writing is often beautiful, even elegiae: "So they moved around that large sad house during the last hot days of summer like ghosts, drifting past one another, saying nothing that mattered, barely acknowledging one another."

Eventually, reality and fear take over and Stella flees her dangerous lover and the squalor she shares with him. Circumstances force Max to take up a lowly position in Wales, where Stella degenerates into ever grimmer self destruction. By the end of the novel, a circle is predictably completed. Nothing is left to chance. Extremes dictate. Another patient, convicted of murder but believed insane, flushed her brutish husband's heart down the toilet because "she didn't want the bastard coming back".

Despite the relentlessly obsessive narrative voice, with its heavily detailed yet strangely flat descriptions, and the thoroughly unconvincing story, in this book McGrath's many gifts as a writer remain elegantly in evidence. Yet here is a storyteller seriously in need of a broader canvas.