In Madlands (Penguin), Carla has just rescued a male vagrant from the clutches of two violent security guards outside a Sea Point shopping mall but, as she observes him slumped in the back seat of her car, she ponders the wisdom of her actions. Why did she take this man into her car?
‘It’s because you’re not buried,” she explains to the reader, ‘You’re still there, like a distressed carcass, all blood and stink and mess. Like him.” Who is ‘him”? The rest of this intriguing book provides amply for a parade of male (and female) figures that might qualify as haunting presences in Carla’s life history and development as a person.
Carla invites the reader on a journey into a ‘labyrinth” to discover events from her personal history that might account for her current life situation — a gradual mental disintegration in adulthood that has earned her a bipolar disorder diagnosis. So, we set off on a ‘case study” that outlines her early history. This includes Carla’s father being imprisoned before her birth on a paedophilia conviction; her depressed mother, who almost aborted Carla; sexual abuse as a small child by a domestic worker; and pregnancy at 15, aborted by an attempted suicide. Aged six, she meets her father for the first time at a prison visit, but this precipitates a terrible regression.
Central to Carla’s ‘case study” is her diagnosis by and subsequent absorption into the male psychiatric profession and its medi-cation roundabouts. But other secondary characters are given chapters of their own to describe the details of and backgrounds to their own mental problems. Throughout the book this provides a surfeit of ‘observations” and ‘descriptions” to facilitate the journey of explanation.
Here is something of my entry into this journey. Dr Bailey, who initially diagnoses Carla, comes under her close, unflattering scrutiny. His office is described as cell-like — a bare, dingy room permeated with a smell of urine (echo father). Bailey’s treatment fails and, after several suicide attempts, Carla is admitted to Valkenberg, a mental institution in Cape Town. Here she is assigned Dr Gold who differs from previous psychiatrists in being able to listen and not judge. Also, he behaves like a normal person.
We are assailed with prosaic details of Dr Gold’s marital problems, and Valkenberg is essentially described as a prison experience (echo father). Nonetheless, we get the message that this Goldfather is not a molester and therefore Carla can tell him the story of a certain Dr Courtney, her previous psychiatrist. Dr Courtney turns out to be a serial molester — of female patients — but Carla was his special lover. This case diary ends with Dr Courtney being tried for misconduct, for which he receives a prison sentence (echo father). In spite of his crimes. Dr Courtney is the only one to suggest a psycho-dynamic explanation: that Carla’s self-destructiveness, rootlessness (capacity to identify with vagrants) and poor impulse control were to do with the absence of a good male figure in her life. As the ‘misguided artist of her own life” she would continue to search for ‘him” in all the wrong places — until, presumably, she had met up with Dr Courtney.
While this is a perverse formulation, it nonetheless reflects the irresistible theme of this book, as we shall discover at the end — the role of sound father attachment in mental stability.
The way the story unfolds — through a variety of individual voices, each a case study — works against emotional involvement between the characters. There are long stretches where the relationships between individual voices lack texture, tension and drama. Even when Carla describes herself during Dr Courtney’s trial as not simply a victim, but an ‘enthusiastic partner”, we have no real impression of her inner conflict in the matter. It is as if the theme of madness should be sufficient to mobilise the reader’s sympathy.
Such privileging of individual observation and description, however, skews the portrayal of the bipolar experience itself. An important aspect of a bipolar mental state, in addition to the individual suffering it reflects, is the interpersonal chaos it causes — how the ‘illness” is lived out between people.
When someone starts talking animatedly into the remote or liquidating his or her assets harum-scarum, it’s someone else sinking lower and lower into abject concern and panic. When that same person cannot get out of bed for three days or starts speaking in catatonic murmurs, it’s someone else who scrambles around for solutions. The bipolarity refers not only to inside, but to what goes on between inside and outside. In this sense it provides an ideal opportunity, in dramatic terms, for a portrayal of a disturbance of this kind, or any other. This opportunity may have been missed in this book, leading to the reader becoming less involved emotionally in Carla’s fate.
The need for explanation over dramatic tension has its most telling effect on how the story ends. In the final pages the reader is transported giddily into an improbable melodrama of reconciliation, coincidental causation and the kind of plot resolution that leaves the reader aghast. Perhaps this type of ending captures something quintessential about a bipolar state of mind — the pull (or push) towards magical, omnipotent thinking (and writing) as a means of coping with life’s harsh but mysterious agonies and contradictions.