Wednesday, June 6, 2018

SHUTTER ISLAND – Dennis Lehane

Shutter Island is so deviously, darkly ingenious it's haunted me ever since I first read it a dozen years ago. The film by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DeCaprio, was pretty spooky, too. But it's the book, not the movie, that haunts me, and maybe that's because it was the book that stole my innocence with its deviously ingenious plot, scaring me damned near into a coma. The plot of Shutter Island is so ingeniously devious it fascinated and horrified me when I read it again, last week. It has one of those endings you like to think of as an aberration, that somehow you missed something important the first time around and you’ll see it now and thank goodness it will end the way your heart would like it to.

It didn’t. It wasn’t as startling as the first time, but it crawled just as deeply into my psyche and left me almost as shaken and bereft. Maybe were I to read it once a week eventually it would injure me no more, but then I’d likely end up as a mental patient myself. I’d be better off putting a sticker on my library card that says in red letters, “Please don’t let me check out Shutter Island ever again!”
The story seems simple enough. Two U.S. marshals arrive at Ashecliffe Hospital, a federal institution for the criminally insane secluded on Shutter Island, one of a string of islands off the coast of Boston. Their assignment is to help authorities there find an escaped patient. We’ve already learned on the ferry bringing them to the island that the approach of a “huge” storm is apt to complicate their mission. It does, of course, but so does an incremental accumulation of odd occurrences the marshals encounter in this ancient fortress-like hospital that had served as a Civil War POW camp. We come to realize the story’s not nearly so simple as at first we thought.
From  the film
There are only sixty-six patients, who, the marshals are told, are the most dangerous in the entire prison system—essentially five-and-a-half dozen Hannibal Lecters--which the marshals understandably keep calling “prisoners” and are continually corrected by the medical staff. And the medical staff? Umm...yes. Dr. Cawley, the head shrink, lives in residence so massive and expensive the Union Army commandant who’d had it built, was relieved of his command when he submitted the construction bill. The head shrink’s chief assistant comes on like a Nazi who missed the boat to Argentina with Dr. Mengele. Here’s how he greets the marshals in the “Great Room” of the head shrink’s house:
The stranger looked up at them. “You don’t indulge in alcohol?”
Teddy looked down at the guy. A small red head perched like a cherry on top of a chunky body. There was something pervasively delicate about him, a sense Teddy got that he spent far too much time in the bathroom every morning pampering himself with talcs and scented oils.
“And you are?” Teddy said.
“My colleague,” Cawley said. “Dr. Jeremiah Naehring.”
The man blinked in acknowledgment but didn’t offer his hand, so neither did Teddy or Chuck.
“I’m curious,” Naehring said as Teddy and Chuck took the two seats that curved away from Naehring’s left side.
“That’s swell,” Teddy said.
“Why you don’t drink alcohol. Isn’t it common for men in your profession to imbibe?”
Cawley handed him his drink and Teddy stood and crossed to the bookshelves to the right of the hearth. “Common enough,” he said. “And yours?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your profession,” Teddy said. “I’ve always heard it’s overrun with boozers.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Haven’t looked too hard, then, huh?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“That’s, what, cold tea in your glass?”
Teddy turned from the books, watched Naehring glance at his glass, a silkworm of a smile twitching his soft mouth. “Excellent, Marshal. You possess outstanding defense mechanisms. I assume you’re quite adept at interrogation.”
Heh heh, ve haff our vays…
And then there’s young doctor Sheehan, who suspiciously left the island when the marshals arrived, leading the marshals to speculate whether Sheehan ran off with the beautiful prisoner/patient after helping her escape from her locked cell despite a gauntlet of guards she’d have to have gotten past. Sheehan’s supposedly taken a long-awaited vacation, but, alas, the phones and radios are down, presumably because of the pending storm, and cannot be reached.
We learn the marshals have their own private agenda for visiting Ashecliffe, to gather evidence for a U.S. Senator of illegal experiments reputedly being conducted on the prisoners...er, patients of the sort Nazis conducted on Jews during WWII.
Dennis Lehane
Another doctor, hiding in a cave on the island, claiming to be the alleged escaped patient, describes to one of the marshals the experiments being conducted in the island’s heavily guarded lighthouse, which is supposedly being used as a sewage treatment facility. The experiments are intended to create a man that “doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t feel pain,” she tells him. “Or love. Or sympathy. A man who can’t be interrogated because his memory banks are wiped clean...they’re creating ghosts here, Marshal. Ghosts to go out into the world and do ghostly work.”
One of the marshals vanishes after the hurricane hits Shutter Island with 150 m.p.h. winds. The surviving marshal, Teddy Daniels, figures his partner’s been murdered and that he, Daniels, is next. His access to the ferry, the only way off the island, is blocked. Determined now to find out what’s going on in the lighthouse, he overpowers a guard, grabs his rifle, and storms into the tower and up the spiraling stairs. I...I can’t go on. I simply can’t tell you what happens next. I...can’t. My fingers have weakened, hands trembling, my heart...oh, mercy!


[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]



18 comments:

  1. I hate the book. It went airborne in disgust by that cop out ending.

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  2. This is one of my favorite books of all time (not as big a fan of the movie, though DiCaprio did his best). Lehane is, as always, brilliant, and yes, I had to reread that one "ambiguous" sentence a dozen times when I finished reading. Clever and fair. You cannot ask for more than that from a mystery/suspense novel. I have often recommended it to friends and other writers as an example of what to do to be great. Thank you for this post.

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    1. Thanks for your insightful comment, Judy. I tend to identify rather closely with strong characters in novels, and, well...this one rather discombobulated me!

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  3. Am I the only one who saw through the plot gimmickry in SHUTTER ISLAND? I thought it was utterly derivative, extremely familiar and the "twist" transparent. Reminded me of dozens of horror movies set in asylums I've seen and books and stories I've read. It's so atypical of Lehane. It felt like he was slumming. I've always felt that it was a screenplay first and then he later turned it into a novel. MYSTIC RIVER is his masterpiece, I think. A genuine modern tragedy. But SHUTTER ISLAND is a 1950s B movie on paper in comparison.

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    1. I suspect you read more critically than I, John. I can't help but suspend disbelief if the writing is clever and the characters strongly drawn. Too, I suspect you're far better read than I am. I swallowed the plot hook, line, and sinker--otherwise I wouldn't have finished the book.

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    2. J F, no, you are not the only one. Hooked by the beginning, caught on my the middle, bored by the end. And you are also correct about MYSTIC RIVER.

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    3. To emphasize, I don't read for profundity, I read for fun. Shutter Island was, to my unsophisticated sensibility, a fun read. That it shocked the shit out of me at the end might reveal my gullibility, but it sure as hell didn't bore me. To me, nothing's more boring than the bored.

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  4. AGREED. Can't help but think of "Let's eat, Grandma" "Let's eat Grandma" when thinking of that book. I love Lehane, so I am biased, but I could not put that book down. To me, that's a winner.

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    1. To me, reading a book twice is a grand slam, Judy.

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  5. I was hooked on the book until the cop out ending. But, Mystic River, on the other hand is the winner.

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    1. I'm curious, Kevin, why do you say "cop out"? How might you have ended the story?

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    2. To me it was like doing a shower scene or that everything was a dream. As a reader, I felt ripped off big time. As a writer.....I have no idea now. I used to have an answer for this question when asked by fans of the book, but too much has happened these past years and now I don't remember my brilliant answer to this question.

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    3. It was a dream, a schizophrenic dream. My former sister-in-law is schizophrenic. Much of her life is a nightmare to her. Shutter Island is about an extreme case of schizophrenia. The only part that pushed the envelope for me was Ashecliffe entire cast participating in Teddy's dream in the hope of shocking him back to reality, without electrodes. Sure it's far-fetched, maybe even implausible on such a large scale. But it's fiction. It asks us to suspend our disbelief long enuf to consider the circumstances. In my opinion only a writer of Lehane's skill could bring it off. John says it's an old idea. I don't know, but even if it is, Lehane's handling of it worked for me and evidently many others with varying degrees of sophistication--even tho my inner child was disappointed it didn't have a happy ending.

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  6. Very interesting post and interesting comments, also. But I am not likely to read the book. I think Dennis Lehane is a very good writer, I read a couple of books in his private eye series (and Mystic River) but I get too tense reading his books and that is not what I read for. I did like the movie of Shutter Island, but did not like the ending especially.

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    1. I suppose one might consider Shutter Island Lehane's "experimental" work. Lehane, Scorsese and DeCaprio are said to be putting together an HBO prequel, tentatively called Ashecliffe. Almost worth getting a TV for.

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  7. Not my kind of book, but I enjoyed your post anyway, Mathew. I like that you get caught up in books the same way I do. I'm not a fan of Dennis Lehane, though I did enjoy - once up on a time - the detective series set in Boston - at least the first couple of books.

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    1. The McKenzie/Gennaro series is more conventional. I always enjoyed with Bubba Ragowski got called in to toss a bomb or two or rough up some bad guys. Gone Baby Gone was probly the most successful of that series, altho I've only read two or three.

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