"We see nobody clearly,"
protagonist Charlie Weir concludes as Trauma nears its end. "We see
only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we
construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood." That's a grim
conclusion for anyone, much less a psychiatrist, but Weir's story gives him
every reason to believe it. Therein lies the brilliance of the novel—and
its most apparent flaw. The accumulated detail in Patrick McGrath's slow reveal
of Weir's history make Weir's fatalistic outlook seem logical and inescapable.
But as the novel nears its final twist, those details start to feel more
contrived, and it becomes apparent that, for all Weir's grim philosophical
conclusions, it's McGrath, not life, who put him in the trap.
So it always is with
fiction, and so long as McGrath keeps his hand out of the frame, Trauma works as an unsettling
psychological study of a man who makes his living diagnosing others, while
leaving himself fatally untreated. A psychiatrist specializing in victims of
combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder before it had a name—the
novel is set largely in the 1970s—Charlie has never recovered from a
childhood darkened by an absent father and a hard-drinking mother who made no
attempts to hide her preference for Charlie's artist brother Walt. But
Charlie's troubles don't end at childhood, and the novel's shattered chronology
finds him reflecting on a failed marriage to the sister of an especially
troubled Vietnam vet patient, a frustrated relationship with one of Walt's
friends, and a last-ditch attempt to repair his family.
He doesn't have a chance. In
fact, the novel's deepest tension comes less from the outcome of Charlie's
endeavors than from the moments when its ever-analytical protagonist casually
mentions doing something horrifically self-defeating, without recognizing the
implications of his actions. McGrath specializes in getting inside the heads of
troubled characters, and, as in his books Asylum and Spider, he maps out Charlie's
psyche with exceptional attention, using his troubled perspective to create a
mood of unrelenting dread. The approach invites the compulsive page-turning of
a more conventional thriller, but ultimately, the surrender to more
conventional elements lets the novel down. When McGrath starts dealing in causes
instead of effects, his blueprint seems less steady than the disturbing
ornamentation that gives Trauma's structure its form.