"You've been excitable and this is to calm you down." He tweaked Harry's jacket off his shoulders. "This is to calm you," one said, as though reading out an official notice. The other undid the cord on his pajama trousers so that they dropped to the floor.
Ignoring him, the attendants broke off from their mumbled conversation. If you want me to climb into a bath and lie there, I'll do it. "I don't need the hammock," he told them. Close to, they were revealed as having a kind of hammock slung in the water. From a distance they looked like ordinary baths. There were eight baths in a row, only three feet apart. He was the first in that day, so the echoing room, where even ordinary speech was magnified to a shout, was quiet except for the sound of filling baths. They were talking to one another as they came for him and continued to talk to one another as they fastened the muff on his wrists and led him along the corridor to the treatment room. But this pair was of the most unsettling kind, the sort that ignored him.
Some were frightened and, like first-timers at a steer branding, hid their fear in swearing and brutality. The attendants came for him as a pair, as always. Forbes Winslow, Turkish Bath in Mental Disorders (1896) He is not permitted the use of his limbs when in the water, but is detained there, or taken out and plunged again in the bath, until the required effect of tranquility is produced. This is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.A violent and excited patient is forcibly taken by his legs and plunged head foremost into an ordinary swimming bath. In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England.
Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything.įorced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies.
I loved it." - Jojo MoyesĪ privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. "Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic, and carries the unmistakable tang of a true story.
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