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Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
I'm not gonna bother with a plot synopsis. I had to do those in school and didn't like it, so there's no way I'll do it for "fun." Instead, I'll include what was written in the book jacket:
Summer 1954
U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.
But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.
And neither is Teddy Daniels.
Is he there to find a missing patient? Of has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe's radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing...
Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?
As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:
How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?
Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?
Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?
What really goes on in Ward C?
Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?
The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island.
Because someone is trying to drive them insane...
Ok, now that that's over, I get to move on to my actual opinion of the book.
The first thing I noticed about it was something that followed me throughout the entire reading experience: The complete disbelief that the book was ever allowed to be published in the first place. Lehane has shocking disregard for all of the fundamental rules of writing. Run-on sentences leap madly off the pages, incomplete thoughts abound, and the characters' uses of modern terms (as well as constant dropping of the f-bomb) suggest that Lehane spent much more time researching the psychiatry to be used in the story than the actual historical period the story encompasses.
Still, all of that pales in comparison to the dialogue.
The story itself is deep and fantastic, however most of the finer and more important plot points are revealed in dialogue. This is highly unfortunate since the dialogue was so badly written, any normal self-respecting publisher should have immediately suffered from explosive vomiting after reading the first few examples of it. Lehane rarely ever annotates who's actually talking, so it's extremely easy to get confused. Especially when you have page after page of nothing BUT dialogue and absolutely no indication of who's saying what. I was frequently frustrated when I'd be trying to read the next great revelation and suddenly got yanked out of the story by confusion and have to go back and reread the last few pages to try to figure it out. No story should ever pull the reader OUT of the story. It prevents you from getting the full impact.
And the impact would have been huge, so it was a major loss.
I had already been writing this post in my head before I finished the book, eagerly planning on harping every detail and complaining that it wasn't even frightening because the writing was so choppy, I couldn't picture it well enough to be scared. I even believe I used the words "tripe" and "drivel" in describing it to my mom yesterday.
The ending, however, makes it worth it all. It was totally unexpected, even for me, and remained unpredictable to the bitter end. It was brilliant and deliciously disturbing, as well as actually having believable credence given the current state of pharmacology in psychiatry. The ending also conveyed a sense of tragedy and hopelessness I haven't read in a thriller that I thought was refreshing compared to the inevitable "happy ending" that all media usually embrace. Because, let's face it, you're not guaranteed a happy ending in life and this adds a somber touch of realism to everything.
All in all, I give Shutter Island a 6 out of 10. I desperately wish I could give it at least an 8, but I can't get the thought of those horrible dialogue strings and writing faux pas out of my head. To be honest, I'm being generous in giving it a 6 instead of a 5. I just think that ending deserves bonus points.
It's worth a read, definitely, but it's a good example that just because something is a best-seller doesn't mean it's better than all the other books out there.
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