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.