Review
BEDLAM
by Greg Hollingshead
HarperCollins, 479 pp.
Remember the pharmacopoeial drugscape, the relief workers’ kinky sex lives, the gas-station jockey with more baggage than a Brandon-bound Greyhound, the real-estate agent with a keenly attuned sense of the apocalypse?
Of course you do. These and other tidbits were scattered throughout Greg Hollingshead’s short-story collection The Roaring Girl like so much sand in an expensive rug. In truth, these weren’t merely details – when it comes to Hollingshead, details are the story. Be it a single quirky line from a conversation or an anachronistic object, readers are used to the University of Alberta professor making every word, every image do double or triple duty.
But just when you think you know Hollingshead, along comes Bedlam. Published 10 years after the Governor General’s Award-winning work that made him famous, this novel is about as different from The Roaring Girl as the South Saskatchewan is from the Thames. For starters, at 130,000 words, it’s Hollingshead’s most ambitious book yet. Set in 18th-century London’s notorious Bethlem Hospital for the insane, Bedlam not only explores an older era, it’s written in period language and tackles some weighty subject matter – nothing less than madness, power and politics, and how they intertwine to affect the lives of three individuals. Add to this that the two most prominent characters are based on real people – John Tilly Matthews, Bethlem’s longest suffering and most famous patient, and resident apothecary John Haslam – and you begin to appreciate the research that went into Bedlam and the achievement this book represents.
It isn’t always obvious here who is insane and who is sane, who is in control and who has finally "lost it" – but that’s the point. The book explores madness in truly wide-eyed fashion, without sermonizing, and asks as many questions as it answers. And its compelling study of power dynamics will have readers sensing the deliberate parallels between Matthews’s battle to be free from Bethlem and the battle for freedom of speech and thought being fought on American soil in the present day.
While Hollingshead shows off his impressive literary chops, fans can rest assured that many of his hallmarks remain. Although there’s much finery on display in Bedlam, there’s still a lot of Alberta grit among all that period prose. This is a funny book, and the characters and details will have you greedily turning the pages. In a world where even King George III is mad, there’s a lot of room for wit of the irreverent variety. In other words: pure, vintage Hollingshead.
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