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James Morrow, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari (Tachyon, 2017, 192pp, ?10.99)
This short, multi-generic novel combines elements of surrealism, sf, fantasy, metafiction, existentialism, humour and satire while extrapolating the titular source material, Robert Wiene's silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), an appropriately multigeneric work in itself that has been widely regarded as an epitome of German Expressionism as well as a precursor to cult, horror, arthouse and noir cinema. In the film, Caligari is an ostensibly pathological hypnotist. He enchants and forces a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit a series of murders in the Actional German village of Holstenwall. In Morrow's book, the main character's first name is Francis; he witnesses the unfolding of Caligari's transgressions and his perspective informs our viewing of the film, which is framed by Francis's retelling of events. Ultimately we learn that Caligari is not a murderer but the director of an insane asylum where Francis has been committed, rendering the film a product of his paranoid delusion.
The Asylum of Dr. Caligari appropriates and riffs on some aspects of the film and can arguably operate as a kind of loose sequel, although a knowledge of the film is not contingent upon an appreciation of Morrow's flight of fancy. Caligari remains the director of an asylum, but of a different type, one specializing in 'art therapy', an experimental form of psychiatric treatment whereby patients come to terms with their various disorders by learning how to channel them onto the canvas. Caligari, rebuking Freud at every turn, believes that the 'future of psychiatry belongs to hypnotism, not to some byzantine theory or sublimated fucking', whilst his method of treatment in 'the brave new world of heteropathic medicine' involves usurping one delusion with another. Caligari adds: 'We charm...