September
15
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
I don’t know if I’ve just finished a book of fact or fiction but I do know that that’s exactly what Graeme Macrae Burnet intended.
It’s London in the 60’s and a quirky young woman makes an appointment with the charismatic yet unqualified psychotherapist of the day, Collins Braithwaite. She wants to see him because her sister committed suicide and she thinks his methods might have played some role in that. She assumes a false identity and decides to record her experience in a series of notebooks. The problem is that after a few appointments, she starts to lose track of her own identity and the reasons she went to see him in the first place.
As if the plot isn’t obtuse enough, it is virtually impossible to understand how much of the story is true. According to the preface, Collins Braithwaite was a real person who wrote several controversial books on psychiatry in the 1960’s. Burnet says his novel is based on historical material written by and about Braithwaite at the time, interspersed with the contents of the notebooks written by the quirky patient above, but I think there’s a very high chance that all of this material is codswallop. I am embarrassed by my confusion but was also relieved to see autofill text when I googled “Is Collins Braithwaite a real person?”.
To be fair, Graeme Macrae Burnet has done this to me before.
In his last book, His Bloody Project (which, by the way, still ranks in my top 10 reads of all time), he also wrote a story based on “historical events and material”. It was never quite believable but the story was so brilliant that I didn’t give a toss either way.
Let’s just say this author has skills. To write a great story is one thing, but to write a great story in a way that deliberately confuses and plays with an audience at the same time is another. Ingenious.
And that’s my 2 cents worth.
Note – His Bloody Project was the highest selling novel on the Booker Prize shortlist in 2016 and Case Study made it to the Longlist in 2022.
Readhead 