The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds – by Tade Thompson

The Wormwood Trilogy is yet another series I want to talk about. In the midst of my process of analysing Rosewater, however, I found out that a few short stories that predate the trilogy are indeed set in the same universe and are seminal to the development of the novel – which means that, according to my self-imposed criteria, they must be discussed first. A quick, frenzied internet search led me to this.

Synopsys

In a squalid, post-apocalyptic London, Anslem Bonadventure helps Dr. McMahon with his work at the the eponymous institute; their working conditions are grim, and their patients are either catatonic or violently psychotic; some of them have been mentally affected by a vaguely defined catastrophe that turned them self-destructively attracted by the Pit that was created by the event. One day, when Anslem decides to sneak his favourite prostitute into the Institute, he sets off a chain of events that quickly unravel out of his control.

Analysis

Style – The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds is written in first person, present tense, in a prose that manages to be at once crude and visionary, with a sizeable contribution of clinical terms that reflect both the Anslem’s practical experience, and the author’s background as a psychiatrist. It’s a raucous, willfully unpleasant style, very effective in evoking both the sordid landscape in which the story is set, and the nightmarish perspective of the main character’s direct experience.

Plot Structure – The story is told in a non-linear fashion; not only because it features several flashbacks to Anslem’s youth, but because the very events it deals with are delivered in a fragmented, discontinuous way, interspersed with the narrator’s attempts to stay sane and grounded. Only as the narration moves on the reader has the chance to put a few pieces together, finally figuring out what was going on since the beginning.

Setting – The story is set in England, after an unspecified event that devastated the surroundings (here we don’t get to see how much it has affected the rest of the world), producing a “pit” that compulsively attracts a multitude of mentally disturbed people – commonly called the “moths” because of their own self-disruptive drive.

The eponymous Institute is a mental institution built in an abandoned church and operating in disastrous conditions: in one scene, we see Anslem pumping a bicycle’s pedals to charge the generator for the electric shock machine; in another, we’re told how he and the doctor must experiment on their patients to figure out which of their fortuitously acquired meds are actually useful, and which are in fact lethal poisons.

Characters – Traded in to the Institute by his own mother, Anslem spent most of his life trotting after Dr. McMahon and dealing with the unpleasant realities of his job and of his world in general. As a result, he appears jaded and barely clinging to the remains of his own sanity – continuously repeating himself that he’s in fact real, while events spin deliriously around him. Other characters are only seen from his perspective, so they mostly just appear as more or less grotesque masks of shattered humanity.

Themes – The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds is a dystopia that feels more like a fever dream, and as such whatever message it could have tried to impart is somehow lost in its audacious and arduous storytelling. Its depiction of a desolate world is not immune to the suspicion of gratuitous shock value (cults that worship prostitutes by drinking their blood, really?). In hindsight, one could see the seeds of what will become the setting of Rosewater, however not much of its complexity is foreseeable at this stage.

Overall Thoughts – So, it’s been an interesting read? Not a particularly pleasant one, mind you, and you can definitely tell it’s the early work of an author whose style had yet to find its mature shape. There is some charm, however, in its roughness and deliberate obscurity, as well as in seeing the first origin of a concept that’s bound to go much farther.