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It is the voice that tells the tale --- the madman's tale --- which makes John Katzenbach's tale such a winner. Almost from the first sentence --- heck, the first word --- Katzenbach infuses this fine novel with a sense of unease, a sense that, while malice is not present, all is not right. The tale is told through the voice of Francis Petrel, whose illness may be cured, but that does not mean he is well.
THE MADMAN'S TALE is not meant to be read on the bus, in a doctor's waiting room, or places of similar hubbub. This is a narrative that demands your undivided attention without distraction. It commences with the interruption of Petrel's post-treatment existence by a voluntary, invitational return to the now-shuttered Western State Hospital. Petrel's day-to-day life is a simple one, consisting of walking the streets under the influence of a medicational regimen (the description of which, while short, is worth reading over and over) and residing in a small, income subsidized apartment, dependent upon the public dole, the kindness of strangers and the occasional charity of his sisters.
Petrel's return to the now-shuttered Western State Hospital some 20 years after his treatment (residency? incarceration?) at the facility is not without purpose. There is a proposal to raze the buildings on the grounds of the former mental hospital and to give the property some high-end residential gentrification. Petrel, as a former patient, is invited to a symposium presented for the purpose of presenting and advancing the plan. Petrel, as he is quick to tell us, is not there to listen to speeches; he is there to visit the grounds he came to know too well. His brief visit awakens memories, never really slumbering, of his treatment there and what occurred at that place and time, events that have repercussions into the present day.
Returning to his sparsely furnished apartment, Petrel begins to tell his tale of what occurred during the time of his treatment. The medium by which he begins writing the narrative that constitutes the bulk of A MADMAN'S TALE is one of the first of many indications that Petrel's problems remain significant, if not immediately obvious to a world that regards him as merely unable to effectively function. His memoirs, which dip and swirl around his fellow patients and the dark and terrible events that involved them all, take on the semblance of a quiet nightmare from which Petrel has yet to escape. His account of the discovery of the desecrated body of a young nurse-trainee is particularly chilling. The reader senses it coming, but it is no less frightening. Even with the sense of foreboding that permeates THE MADMAN'S TALE, one can never fully anticipate what will happen from page to page, practically to the end of the work.
Katzenbach, as he has demonstrated time and again in the past, is a quiet stylistic marvel. He can do more to establish an atmosphere of unease in a single paragraph than many writers can do in entire pages or chapters. It is no surprise that THE MADMAN'S TALE has been optioned for development as a film. Think lots of shadows, lots of grays, and lots of silent heart attacks following the viewing, not to mention the reading.
The late Shirley Jackson used to do this so well, in terms of creating a dark atmosphere in which neither the reader nor the narrator knew precisely what would happen next. In THE MADMAN'S TALE, Katzenbach finishes the work that Jackson left undone.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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