7th December 2005
Right now I should be writing my novel, but the temptation to begin writing this blog was too much. I'm writing my first novel and it's about a psychiatrist, how the symptoms he deals with every day in his patients trap him in an unsuspecting way. It's not a novel about madness. Too often, depressives write novels about depression and the result rarely exceeds the depressing. It's a book about religious culture as well, insofar as I have imagined it. And the pain of living life solely within the imagination.
Brief synopses: An out-patient is in love with Dr James Porter's wife; and their daughter, it is revealed in a diary, cares for the out-patient. The psychiatrist's close friend, Professor Kolinsky, an emigre from Russia confesses to him that he is having an affair with a student he met in the middle east, who he has invited to study over here in England. Over the course of the novel, with the encouragment of Professor Kolinsky's letters, Dr Porter's imagination gets sexually feverish concerning this young muslim woman and admits to himself that with his marriage dead, he is in love, probably for the first time. But the young muslim woman exists entirely within Dr Porter's imagination. Does she exist? Is the doctor deluded? This leads to the denoument between the psychiatrist and Professor Kolinsky, and finally, perhaps tragically, his out-patient and daughter.
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