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Dennis Lehane
SHUTTER ISLAND 1993 New York. HarperCollins. August 2009. Paper. 400 pp. ISBN: 0061703257 Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 12/31/2011 TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Anagram Your Way to a Solution." Would you recommend this book to other readers? yes. review: If you have watched SHUTTER ISLAND (the 2010 Martin Scorsese movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio) before reading the novel, then you already know every "spoiler" in this "spoiler-rich" book. This much reviewed novel by Dennis Lehane is rightly acclaimed. Read it! It is almost impossible to review it, however, without giving away its ending, and that ending should not be spoiled. I will therefore say little. According to the novel's Prologue, the narrative is taken from the May 3, 1993 journal of Dr Lester Sheehan, psychiatrist. It describes four "late summer" days in September 1954, almost 40 years earlier. The narrator, Dr Sheehan, will soon lose his wife to illness. His own health is not great. He forgets a lot. But the story of Shutter Island is one he must set down before it is too late. The tale, we are told by Dr Sheehan, is about four people and an island overrun with huge rats. Every day some rats hopelessly try to swim across waters near Boston to freedom on the mainland. They never make it. But Teddy Daniel, the novel's principal character, would cheer their effort. Teddy once had "a poor dead wife, Dolores Chanal." Two other key characters, described as "twin terrors" are Rachel Solando and Andrew Laeddis. At novel's beginning two U.S. Marshals, Teddy Daniel and Chuck Aule are arriving by ferry on isolated island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the violent criminally insane. This is a Federal faciity. And a patient committed to it by a Federal judge had escaped from her cell the night before. I will say no more, other than to suggest that you are about to enter into a world of mindgames, codes and most especially anagrams. Think about anagrams really hard and virtually on every page. And further spoiler spoileth not! Enjoy. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/349146123.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 01/01/2011 name of review: Anagrams anyone? rating: * * * * * review: SHUTTER ISLAND is a novel about a homicidal maniac told by his psychiatrist nearly 40 years after "four strange days of late summer 1954." The focus of events is a fictitious island not far from Boston where stands Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally and violently insane. The psychiatrist narrator Dr Lester Sheehan, writing in May 1993, himself betrays signs of failing memory and growing mental confusion. The characters most focused on in Dr Sheehan's narrative are two men and two women: Edward
"Teddy" Daniels - Andrew Laeddis
and Dolores Chanal - Rachel Solando. Another key character is U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels's partner in investigating the escape the night before of an Ashecliffe Hospital patient -- Chuck Aule. Yet another indispensable character is Dr John Cawley, Hospital Chief of Staff. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are told that Dr Sheehan has just left the island for vacation. Yet he is also the focus when Daniels and Aule investigate the patient's disappearance. Count the characters: Sheehan, Daniels, Laeddis, Chanal, Solando, Aule, Cawley. They add up to seven names. You get a sense of the mind games being played in SHUTTER ISLAND when it slowly comes to you that there are seven names but only four corresponding flesh and blood persons pointed to by the names. SHUTTER ISLAND is virtually impossible to review without "spoiling" the ending. Let me content myself with the hint above and to urge you to pay attention to every mention of codes and anagrams. Look especially hard for anagrams: combinations of the same letters in the same numbers giving more than one name or word. SHUTTER ISLAND is offbeat, not entirely plausible, but brilliantly original. Descriptions of buildings and a hurricane will stay with you. The questions underlying the narrative seem to be: why
are the violently insane so likely to lie to themselves about whom they
murdered and why?
If an insane murderer dons an impenetrable internal mask and pretends to be innocent, can he be cured by making him face the truth? And how on earth do you motivate him to want to turn the mask into a mirror in order to know the truth? -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/cafelibri/reviews/book/UserReview -Shutter_Island_book_-74-1425615-198337- Anagrams_anyone_.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 01/01/2011 title of review: Rats far outnumber people. But both want to escape Shutter Island. rating: * * * * * review: Rats abound on Shutter Island somewhere in the waters not far from Boston. In early September 1954 there are nearly 70 criminally insane patients assigned there by Federal Court order to the Ashecliffe Hospital. If you are cured, you can leave. And the cures involve either surgery (e.g. lobotomies), drugs, shock treatment or, in one particularly knotty case, depth psychiatry to unlock a patient's delusion that he had not gut shot his wife after she had drowned their three children. If, furthermore, it is the case that the alcohol-addicted, migraine-suffering killer had for years misdiagnosed his wife's mental ailment and depression despite being told he was wrong by psychiatrists, then his coping mechanisms and denial must lie unusually deep in the psyche. *** There are in fact four principal characters in SHUTTER ISLAND. But among them they go by seven names. It is hard to write a review without giving away the VERY surprising ending. This is a puzzle you do well to solve for yourself. The author is good at dropping clues to what is really happening in what must be one of literature's largest, most complex and longest ("four late summer days") mind games meant to cure an insane murderer of illusions. EXAMPLES OF CLUES: (1)
watch one U. S. Marshal fumble clumsily with his side arm;
(2) The disappeared patient sought by the Marshals leaves a riddle behind; (3) In any verbal situation in you can possibly sense an anagram, sense it! Reminding a bit of much persecuted John Rambo, U.S. Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels, is on the island to investigate the disappearance the night before of a female patient. Teddy suddenly unleashes violence once indulged legally as a GI in World War II, and tries every trick to escape Shutter Island once he discovers that the doctors want to immobilize and lobotomize him. In his desire for freedom he resembles the vividly described rats, some of which swim out every day to drown in the forbidding waters surrounding the island. SHUTTER ISLAND is one of the more original, maze-rich novels I have read in the past ten years. I commend it to you, as well as the movie of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Marshal Daniels. -OOO- recommended reading: -- James Fenimore Cooper - THE WAYS OF THE HOUR http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review.aspx?reviewid=1510146 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 01/01/2011 title of review: First class mystery novel. Brilliantly framed. rating: * * * * * review: It is hard to write a normal review of SHUTTER ISLAND without "spoiling" the ending. And much of the pleasure of reading this novel is to sift the clues for yourself and at least lessen the huge surprise at novel's end. This is a novel of criminal insanity and the various cures in vogue during "four days in late summer," early September 1954. The setting is an island washed in the same waters as nearby Boston. On it, in buildings dating to the U.S. Civil War, there stands forbidding Ashecliffe Hospital, led by world-renowned genius psychiatrist Dr John Cawley. On the night before the novel opens, a murderous patient named Rachel Solando has escaped from her locked cell. Two U.S. Marshals, Edward "Teddy" Daniels and Chuck Aule take a ferry to Shutter Island to investigate. Apart from the plot itself, I invite you to notice the "framing" of this puzzle-rich, enigma-endowed thriller. First, the tale is narrated in May 1993 by Dr Lester Sheehan (Prologue). Looking back to his time nearly 40 years earlier in residence at Ashecliffe Hospital, psychiatrist Sheehan admits that his memory is not what it used to be and that his mind is being eroded at the edges. It's therefore now or never to tell the story of Teddy Daniels. And tell that story Dr Sheehan does. Yet the narration almost always is from the point of view of Marshal Daniels. Indeed Dr Sheehan, we are told in the story by narrator Dr Sheehan himself, left the island aboard the same ferry the two marshals had arrived on. So how did Dr Sheehan know every last detail of those four days in 1954? And when did he know them? In his Prolog Dr Sheehan specifically names four characters of his story. They are two men and two women: Edward
"Teddy" Daniels - Andrew Laeddis
and Dolores Chanal - Rachel Solando. A second framing element of the novel is the importance attached to it of the riddle left behind by missing patient Rachel Solando. It turns out that both Marshal Daniels and hospital Chief of Staff Dr John Cawley have a background in Government intelligence and code-breaking. Marshal Daniels is, in effect, invited to enter the mind of Rachel Solano through her riddle/puzzle/cypher: a matter of words and numbers. Perhaps most importantly, thirdly, this novel, as time passes, turns to anagrams (same letters rearranged to form different words or names) as additional ways to enter a patient's mind. At the medical-philosophical level, SHUTTER ISLAND is a novel about mental illness of the violently insane and how it might have been treated in 1954. Four techniques are discussed: surgery (especially lobotomies), drugs, electrical shocks and depth psychiatry. Depth psychiatry is the newest method and under fire from both the medical and Federal Government resources funding the hospital. In effect, the novel is about a four day long test to see if a convicted murderer who thinks he is innocent and knows who the real killer is can be cured by cajoling him through play acting to re-enact his crime and then assume -- permanently -- permanent responsibility for his misdeed. If he can, he will be pronounced cured and released back into society. Implausible. But in the skilled hands of author Dennis Lehane, SHUTTER ISLAND works. Enjoy this thriller for its plot, storm descriptions, debates about mental illness, framing devices and psychic puzzles to be decrypted through codes and anagrams. This is not a "whodunnit." It's a "whydunnit" and why can't he admit that he "dunnit"? -OOO- tags: dennis lehane, thriller, treating the violently insane, narrative framing techniques http://www.amazon.com/Shutter-Island-Mass-Market- Paperback/dp/B00394A4UK/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie =UTF8&qid=1293622671&sr=1-4 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 01/01/2011 Review Title: A novelist illuminates human madness Product Rating: * * * * * Pros: Embrace an artistic depiction of dangerous madness. Take part in innovative therapeutic stage play. Cons: Dash past or underweight the informative Prologue at your peril. Labor throughout with anagrams! The Bottom Line: Make room, Shakespeare, Mother Goose, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Ken Kesey for a new literary master of madness: Dennis Lehane. Shutter Island cures or kills. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island Dennis Lehane's 1993 thriller SHUTTER ISLAND has the heft of a permanently valuable literary classic about mental illness, its sometimes baffling symptoms and four cures doctors were willing to try in 1954. Writers and poets have long done their part to cast light on the dark doings of minds gone astray. Think of Shakespeare's showing that insanity can be pretended: "I am but mad north-north-west" (HAMLET Act II, Scene 2); of Sir Walter Scott's THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR; James Fenimore Cooper's mentally abnormal women: young, pious Hetty Hutter in THE DEERSLAYER and the subtly drawn eccentric heiress Mary Monson -- or is she Madame de Larocheforte, in THE WAYS OF THE HOUR. Even Mother Goose is a player in madness-probing in the lines "Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn; Wire, briar, limber lock, Three geese in a flock. One flew east, And one flew west, And one flew over the cuckoo's nest." Those lines in turn inspired Ken Kesey's great 1962 novel of treatment of mental ailments, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. And on and on. Add your own favorite prober of offbeat mental ways, say, JANE EYRE or MOBY-DICK. Madness happens and it takes many forms. Thank the Lord for artists in word and paints who are there to portray it to us and give us glimpses into its dark corners. The subject of SHUTTER ISLAND is madness that is violent and anti-social. What if in the 1950s you had shot your wife dead after she had just drowned your three children? She was arguably mad and therefore not clinically responsible, but you had denied the evidence of deep depression for years as you yourself fled blindly ever deeper into drink. You had explicitly denied the mother of your children the treatment that psychiatrists urged on you both. You had directly killed the woman you loved (as Oscar Wilde might have predicted) but also indirectly drowned the children you both had made and cherished. Yet you are not, in your own eyes, that kind of man. You couldn't have killed them. Therefore, you did not kill them. So, who did? You knew in your own twisted labyrinthine mind. And you had discovered through police work that the convicted killer was a patient on Shutter Island. Consider such a truth-denying, very violent killer: how might you cure him in 1954? Four methods are debated in SHUTTER ISLAND: surgery (lobotomy), drugs, shock treatment and unblocking the patient's mind through psychiatric play acting. Part of that treatment would be to coach the mad man to reach into the mind of a mad woman patient and find himself reflected there through unraveling a riddle she had left behind when she escaped her guards to freedom. At a deeper level, the patient would also transfer to himself wisdom gained from a planted anagram's insight. Either his mind would play Nathan the prophet telling King David, "Thou art the man," or the patient would be reluctantly but professionally turned into a non-violent vegetable. The stakes are very high in SHUTTER ISLAND. And it is not enough that the patient should briefly unblock his long suppressed memories and admit responsibility. He had done so once nine months earlier, after nearly two years of treatment. No, if he wants to leave Shutter Island a free man, he will have to convince his doctors that he will admit that truth forever and anon. That is the madness and the high-risk healing described in SHUTTER ISLAND. The tale is told many years after events had been recorded in the journals of Dr. Lester Sheehan, one time psychiatrist on the staff of the island's Ashecliffe Hospital for the violently insane. As he looks back nearly 40 years to four days in early September 1954, Sheehan now detects signs of mental slippage in himself. He knows what madness is and what the elaborate stage play had been that gave SHUTTER ISLAND'S tragic hero one last chance to answer truthfully, "what is truth?" We readers are given clue after clue from Prologue through Chapter 25 that a certain character is not who he pretends to be or at least thinks that he is. SHUTTER ISLAND is a thriller puzzle fairly presented. Unknotting its enigmas and squinting into its darkness make up half the pleasure of reading. -OOO- Recommended: Yes http://www0.epinions.com/reviewShutter_Island_by_Dennis_Lehane _and_narrated_by_David_Strathairn_and_narrated_by_Tom _Stechschulte/content_536333946500 |