Reading the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize Shortlist

At the beginning of the summer, thanks to a competition run by Latitude Festival on Instagram, I was fortunate enough to win a complete set of the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize shortlist. I had only read one of these books previously, ‘Playthings’ by Alex Pheby. When another book on the list, ‘The Outrun’ by Amy Lipcot, subsequently won the Wainwright Prize I decided to abandon my reading plans for the summer – which had included finally getting round to reading ‘War and Peace’ – and work my way through this shortlist. It has been a rewarding experience.

My daughter is a second year medical student with a particular interest in neurology. She and her friends treated themselves to a visit to the Wellcome Collection in London at the end of the academic year, something I also hope to do in the future. She read several of the books alongside me and we have enjoyed discussing the topics explored.

“The Wellcome Book Prize is an annual award, open to new works of fiction or non-fiction. To be eligible for entry, a book should have a central theme that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness. This can cover many genres of writing – including crime, romance, popular science, sci fi and history.

At some point, medicine touches all our lives. Books that find stories in those brushes with medicine are ones that add new meaning to what it means to be human. The subjects these books grapple with might include birth and beginnings, illness and loss, pain, memory, and identity. In keeping with its vision and goals, the Wellcome Book Prize aims to excite public interest and encourage debate around these topics.”

My own interest is in psychology, a subject I have studied on line in recent years thanks to FutureLearn. Armed with this knowledge I eagerly delved in. You may click on each title below to read my reviews.

Playthings by Alex Pheby

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan

The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

These books provided me with an opportunity to read genres that I would not normally choose. Although I do carefully select a small number of non fiction titles each year, I tend to avoid memoirs. I am glad that I was open to the contents of each and every one of the books on this list. I learned from them all.

The winner of the prize was ‘It’s All In Your Head’ by Suzanne O’Sullivan. When I posted my review I discovered that this was a controversial choice. For the first time I received negative feedback from sufferers of the disorders discussed who felt that the author was belittling their ailments by suggesting they were psychosomatic. I found their responses particularly ironic as this is exactly the problem she wrote the book to counter – the continuing and unreasonable stigma associated with psychosomatic illness.

Notwithstanding my brush with angry, on line readers, I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience of reading a complete book prize shortlist. So enamoured was I with the quality of the writing I have set myself the challenge of doing it again. In amongst my other planned posts in the coming months you may look out for reviews of those works currently vying for the 2016 Guardian Not The Booker Prize. I will also be reading the 2015 Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist, which has been sitting on my shelves tempting me since last year.

Book Review: Playthings

“Not at all, Herr Schreber. You do not seem cured at all. But I don’t imagine there is anything much I can do to cure you. I can bring you here and you can see how it is that everything is quite sensible and ordinary. I can help you see that your anxieties are exaggerations of very simple and commonplace problems that a man might have. […] But I cannot make you see what is in front of you.”

Playthings, by Alex Pheby, is written from the point of view of a retired German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who, upon finding his wife collapsed on the floor of their parlour, becomes psychotically agitated. Paul suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox, which today is known as paranoid schizophrenia. Being taken inside the head of a man with this illness is disturbing, but the author does so with aplomb.

Paul Schreber was born in 1842, in Leipzig, Saxony. He was the son of a successful physician who founded and ran the Orthopaedic Institute in which Paul and his four siblings were raised. His father was a pedagogue, demanding that all in his home adhere to a strict routine. He raised his son to believe that boys should be manly and energetic, and that the poor or deformed, including those he treated at his institute, were lesser beings.

Paul Schreber suffered three major psychotic episodes in his life, describing the second in a memoir which became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Freud (the memoir has become a key text for students of psychology and modern and social and cultural history). Alex Pheby has taken the known facts and woven them into a compelling and compassionate account of how it would be to live with this illness.

Early on in the book, when Schreber is wandering the streets, he encounters members of the public whom he talks to from the confusion his reality has become. He frightens and appalls them, pushing them aside as insubstantial, inconsequential objects. He is intent on pursuing what to him seems a valid response to a skewed world.

At times this world becomes two dimensional; familiar people and places appear flimsy, ripples in space.

“His house was not there. Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps. In their place were representations of these things. The objects […] they were changed […] they were all wrong. […] all these things were there, but when Schreber came close and put his cold fingertips to them they were smooth as pieces of letter paper and just as thin […] all utterly false.”

Schreber’s reality will often digress from that which those around him can see. People appear, who talk to him of his past, who know things that they should not. They remind him of incidents which he finds embarrassing or upsetting. They force him to acknowledge facts he has difficulty facing.

Much of what Schreber does and says during his time in hospital is wiped from his memory. He loses days, weeks, sometimes months at a time. During his more lucid moments he looks back on his life and the reader learns of his childhood, snapshots of significant moments. There are fleeting references to incidents which disturb his equilibrium, memories which he has buried in the basement of his mind.

Schreber’s family struggle to cope with what he has become. His daughter wishes to bring him home but his wife fears she would be unable to cope. She worries that he will write another memoir and embarrass them further. His first contained wild imaginings from his extreme delusional state, although he did not accept that they were delusions. He now denies that he ever had such thoughts.

This book allows the reader to see not only the patient’s struggles and fears but also the impotence of those around, however worthy their aims. Solutions acceptable to society involve locking the patient away, physically or pharmaceutically. With no cure available it is possible to empathise with all involved.

An incredible work of fiction, all the more fascinating for being based on an actual case. The writing is taut, intense, the everyday world a phantom which Schreber tries so desperately to attain. His disturbance of mind is not so much explained as experienced. This story is powerful and moving; I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the humanity behind mental illness.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Galley Beggar Press.