One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I've been aware of Ken Kesey for a long time, since I've read books by or about people he associated with, like [a:Neal Cassady|79334|Neal Cassady|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1267720258p2/79334.jpg], [a:Jack Kerouac|1742|Jack Kerouac|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1544568646p2/1742.jpg] and [a:Allen Ginsberg|4261|Allen Ginsberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1421583811p2/4261.jpg]. I've also been aware of this book for a long time, and knew it was set in a lunatic asylum, but had never read it before.

But though I have known about it for a long time, it was not long enough. I should have read it in my late teens or early twenties, which was when I was most concerned about the boundaries between sanity and madness. That was when I most appreciated Ginsberg's poem Howl, written for his friend Carl Solomon, who had the electric shock therapy that was then a fashionable treatment for certain kinds of mental illness.

Most of the action in the book takes place in a ward of a mental hospital, presided over by a tyrannical nurse, whose measure of her patients' progress is how amenable and cooperative they are with her arbitrary rules. Her rule is threatened by a new patient, McMurphy, who questions the rules and the values behind them, and keeps demanding changes, while the nurse keeps threatening him with electric shock therapy.

McMurphy is a disruptive influence in the ward, at least in the eyes of the nurse, but he manages ro secure a brief respite for some of the patients when he organises a deep-sea fishing trip away from the hospital, and they have to cope with all kinds of obstacles that threaten to scupper it. Are the loonies managing to function in a sane society, or are they in fact the only sane ones in a mad society where everyone seems out to get them and make their lives miserable?

As I often do, I've posted an expanded version of this on my blog here One flew over the cuckoo’s nest | Notes from underground. This goes beyond the bookitself, and looks at the times in which it was written and published, and something of the Zeitgeist.

Years ago I saw the film and my daughter studying the book for her final year in secondary school gave me the opportunity to read the book. In a lot of ways, the film followed the book quite closely, at least as far as I can remember after quite some years. But of course one of the distinctive aspects of the book is that the narrator is also one of the main characters, which in this case means it is told from the point of view of a person with mental illness. Sensibly, the film didn't try that, proving that once again no amount of special effects can match the imagination of a reader. I would like to think that the abuse of patients in mental hospitals no longer happens in the way that the book so graphically describes, though it would be naive to think that new methods haven't come in their places. Nevertheless, the challenge that Kesey faces us with as to what our attitude is to people with mental illness and how much we might go along with societal problems being out of sight and so out of mind and so conveniently not in need of a solution, are just as valid today.