Harsimran Kaur On July 11, 2024, In Book Review, The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides-Fiction
Rating: 4/5
Alicia Berenson is undeterred to break the cacophony of life’s exultations that were once a prodigal indulgence; she is now silent like a precipice. The swings have halted, the leaves have stopped rustling; it looks as if the Earth has snubbed under the ground and the heavens have stopped befalling on the magnanimity of the wise. Silence has gripped the vast oceans; the protuberant waves now diminish as a evaporating staccato.
Her heart—Alicia’s heart, a hanging valley, has seeped in all this silence. She now stares inside the dark circles of the Eclipse, a vague foreboding only she knows and perceives; a kind of hard-bitten saprophyte nobody wants to touch and feel.
Silence, the unseen ‘devil’ scourges the sufferings and sadness that lies obnoxiously in the pageantry of the past. It so slithers through the swollen veins of Alicia. Her silence often provokes a bedlam but she remains quiet. What is she carrying to subject her to such an invidious slugfest? Is it remorse or a disinclination to accept the virtues? Or is it a serene preference to delve into the conscious that splurges as a refutation?
Through all these emotions, she still remains silent!
Alicia Berenson has been incriminated for killing her husband Gabriel by shooting him five times. Due to her contorted mind undressed as a psychiatric case, she is admitted to ‘The Grove’ for her treatment and rehabilitation. Testimonies and evidence turn out to be a futile blow pipe as Alicia continues to remain silent. Gaunt and gawky, she eventually becomes a repugnant burdock that the therapist cast their hands off.
But one Psychotherapist pulls the bull by its horns to enfeeble the ‘stoic silence’ that grapples Alicia. Theo Faber joins ‘The Grove’ with an inherent vision to treat Alicia. Is he a therapist by choice? Theo has veritably had a vanquished childhood. He gradually forms a contorted deception to his real personality, a kind of de rigueur by his father to call him a ‘misaligned vagabond’ or a ‘rotten apple in the barrel’. Carrying these tragic wounds to finally become a therapist is a fixture to not let bigots infest the wound.
I firmly believe that ‘past’ is not something that you can extricate from. In fact, it is the one reality that we experience and live bit by bit. It never leaves us; the more we try to tear it apart, the more it embraces us. Both ‘Theo’ and ‘Alicia’ have an irrevocable past; does it impinge their scrupulous intentions to ‘deny’ or ‘accept’ what was once their reality or insinuates to finally succumb to the anomalies of childhood?
‘The Silent Patient’ by Alex Michaelidies is his debut novel that presses on the fact that ‘past traumas’ eavesdrop in the present to make it an incongruent bullet sticking to our head feverishly. The metaphor has been stewed in the thriller to make the read ineluctable and impassioned.
Theo is torn between his indelible past and an emollient present—a skirmish of sots between a dilapidated childhood and the love of his life, ‘Kathy’.
Alicia, the painter and the murderer, in her last testimony strokes a last painting ‘ALCESTIS’ that dates back to a Greek myth. Does Alicia want to say something? Is her silence a fabricated misadventure?
‘The Grove’ seamlessly treats patients but Alicia turns out to be hugger-mugger or a ‘hang-up desolate infringement’ for them. Finally, does Theo take Alicia out of the woods and is able to envision her side of the story or falls into a despicable trap of insinuations and intemperate collisions?
TAKE AWAY
Alicia writes a diary; it’s not just about emotions and fears but unequivocally a pantheon of sentiments that are elusive to one’s own conscious. We tend to overlook such eccentricities because we like to be ensconced forever in a comfort zone. But, we forget life is about ‘punctuations’ and not ‘words’. It’s the serenity of ‘commas’ and the dysfunctional ‘semi-colon’ that puts a full stop to our fallacies and fantasies.
‘The Silent Patient’ is a captivating thriller. It’s now to be seen when Alicia puts a ‘full stop’ to her chaperoned silence.
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