She would have had to get out of a locked room and past assorted guards and orderlies.
Solando's escape is suspicious on the face of it. When they arrive they are relieved of their weapons (hospital regulations!) and introduced to the medical director, the slippery Dr. The pair have been summoned to the island to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, incarcerated after drowning her three children (shades of Andrea Yates here). His new partner, Chuck Aule, a recent transfer from the West Coast, seems a more blithe sort. Two years earlier his beloved wife died violently, a loss that preys on his mind. Teddy Daniels, the senior of the two, is a decorated World War II veteran. marshals on a Boston Harbor ferry plying the waters toward Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. This is a novel about the extremes of psychopathology, which is why it evokes comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe's tales.
Such is the case here, but beyond that, Shutter Island hinges on the question of whose head is screwed on straight and whose isn't, whose view of reality is trustworthy and whose is seriously deranged. It is also a hard book to review because you wouldn't want to give away too much of the plot.Ī crime novel almost always involves a sleuth who must sort out who's telling the truth and who's not, in a context where the wrong conclusion could prove fatal. Or to fans of Mystic River, Lehane's 2001 book, another best seller and the basis for the forthcoming Clint Eastwood movie.īut those who haven't made Lehane's acquaintance should know that Shutter Island is a superbly constructed novel that manages to be at once gripping, surprising and discomforting. This won't come as a surprise to the thousands of readers who made the novel a New York Times best seller (it slipped off the list today after a four-week run). On the basis of Shutter Island I would agree that Lehane is very good indeed.
But they generally get a lot less respect than literary novelists like Franzen and Hornby. It isn't that genre authors get no respect. That's strong endorsement for a writer of crime fiction. So is Lehane, Staley told me, nodding toward a copy of Shutter Island sitting in his office. Jonathan Franzen and Nick Hornby are examples of those on this watch-list for canonization. In addition to collecting the literary papers of the already famous, the Ransom Center monitors the careers of up-and-coming writers whose archives it might someday want to acquire.
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