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47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant and worrying satire on Mental Health, 2 May 2007
Clare Allen's debut novel has been one of the best received debuts of the last year. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and favourite to win the Orange New Writers title, her novel about a Mental Health hospital in North London has struck a nerve with readers and critics alike.
It is told through the eyes of N, a self-confessed `dribbler' whose only ambition is never to be discharged. But when Poppy Shakespeare arrives sporting snakeskin heals and insisting she is not crazy N's routine life is thrown into chaos. Together they must prove that Poppy really isn't mad, but they are in a Cactch-22 situation: to prove she is sane she must pretend to be mad. What follows is a journey to the very heart of the bureaucratic hypocrisy of modern mental health care and a wry and terrifying liturgy on the impossibility of being an individual faced with the power of the system.
Comparisons to `Catch-22' and `One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest' have inevitably gushed from the pens of critics. There is certainly something of the surreal absurdity of Catch-22 here, although it is not as laugh-out-loud funny. In its potential ramifications for the perception of mental health care in Britain its legacy could be as great as `One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest'. The story is perfect for film adaptation, the characters fresh and instantly likeable. The story is written in N's vernacular dialect which takes a little getting used to but is used consistently well and N grows to become a wonderful anti-hero.
Poppy Shakespeare owes something to Clare Allen's own biography. Her eye for irony and well honed observations were learned during her own ten year stint in a mental-health day centre. This experience, far from making this story overly emotional or self indulgent, gives `Poppy Shakespeare' a real air of authenticity. The portrayal of the claustrophobic world of the Dorothy Fish is so alive with insight that you come away from it with real and justifiable fears. It is a book which asks the most elemental of questions: who is mad? Who is sane? And most importantly, who decides?
Clare Allen has written a very good debut novel, it is technically astute and a moving story. Few books should be made required reading, but this in all its political incorrectness, is one of them.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
wry and witty, 13 April 2007
Poppy Shakespeare, Clare Allan's Orange shortlisted novel, takes a terrifying, wry and witty look at the current state of mental health care. Related in the semi-literate vernacular of N, one of the patients on the Dorothy ish day ward of the Abaddon mental hospital, it follows events when a new patient, Poppy Shakespeare, is admitted as a new day patient. Poppy insists she has not got any mental health problems, but this is nothing new in psychiatry - denial and lack of insight are well recognised traits in psychiatric patients. But it soon becomes apparent that Poppy really shouldn't be there - and N embarks on a long course of action to help her get free. Thus a Catch 22-type chain of events is set in motion - Poppy can only prove she is not mentally ill by pretending to be mentally ill. Meanwhile, the system drags her to rock bottom and she develops - you've guessed it - symptoms of psychiatric illness.
Clare Allan has a sharp and perceptive insight into what goes on in psychiatric hospitals, and when related deadpan, it DOES sound risible. Yes, patients DO sit about chain-smoking all day, yes, in an under-resourced and over-burdened system, interaction with nurses and doctors really CAN be as rare as Allan conveys, yes, some older anti-psychotics drugs really DO induce vile side effects that reduce patients to twitching zombies, and so lack of compliance and abuse of drug regimes IS common. And Allan captures spot-on the paradoxes and sheer idiocies of a political system that puts targets before patients and sells off health care to the highest bidder. Although events and constructions are clearly fictional, they are not THAT far-fetched - a Mad Tzar, after all, is only one step away from our current plethora of Drug and other touchy-feely but ultimately useless Tzars, while discharging patients before they are ready in order to save resources is a well-established necessity in our cash-strapped NHS. Although the days of chaining up people with psychiatric problems are long gone, psychiatric care is far from the soothing and therapeutic panacea it should be.
Full of dry humour and shockingly astute observations , Allan's debut is a stonkingly good read. My initial slight enniue at a text written entirely in slang dialect (a trick that has become commonplace since its devastatingly effective first few uses by the likes of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman) soon evaporated and I thoroughly enjoyed this clever and well-written novel.
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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Rare Novel, 3 April 2006
Poppy Shakespeare is that rare thing: a novel that fully lives up to its publisher's hype. It is engaging from the start, with energetic hyperbolic prose which immediately brings to life its narrator, N, and through her, Poppy and the other patients at the day centre. There is a fine border between sanity and madness and it shifts about a fair bit during the course of the novel, causing a constant reassessment of the reader's own perceptions. The subject matter may perhaps not immediately appeal to some people, but the novel is so extravagantly funny, yet so movingly serious, that I would urge anyone to put aside any doubts and read it. You won't regret it. You'll be gripped from the first page. This is a novel which deserves to be read from an exciting new writer with a unique voice. Clare Allan is the real deal. Don't miss out on her debut.
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