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FICTION
The Glass House
Anne Buist & Graeme Simsion
Hachette, $32.99
The opening chapter of The Glass House reads like a treatment for a new drama. The novel, the first in a collaborative series between Graeme Simsion and his wife, Anne Buist, a perinatal psychiatrist – contains all the comforting trappings of a fast-paced medical procedural.
There’s the alluring propulsion of watching sedulous characters work within the high-stakes drama of keeping vulnerable people alive. The disparate medical professionals work together in their attempts to extract information from patients for diagnosis and treatment. Opinions clash. Egos are chipped.
Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion have written a novel together.Credit: Wolter Peeters
We are dropped into the middle of the acute psychiatry ward at Menzies Hospital in Melbourne, where Hannah Wright is fresh into her role as a psych registrar. She’s a country girl (“I’m Hannah from the Grampians,” she announces at her first social gathering with other registrars) who has “no time for personal stuff”. Inevitably, personal stuff will leak into her professional output. She works long hours and prides herself on her intuition and resilience — she can read patients like a detective reads a lying criminal.
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Over the course of the novel, Hannah must negotiate her place within the coterie of medical staff and impenetrable patients with varying severities of schizo-affective disorder, personality disorder, PTSD and schizophrenia.
The resident “joker” provides comic relief, coming in the form of a manic barrister who is undone by a recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The “thwarted woman” is a police officer admitted to the ward with unusual symptoms after her husband left her for a younger woman — now pregnant. The “culturally diverse” character is an Afghan who is reluctantly admitted after he almost ran over a politician who jumped in front of his truck. Said politician is a well-liked MP trying to process his suicide attempt.
While Hannah works to help the driver manage the PTSD he developed in his home country, the MP is dodging his duties as a patient, using the affectations of his personality to distract everyone from his condition.
Like any long-form medical narrative, we have one patient who eludes our protagonist. Here, it is a new mother admitted involuntarily with postpartum psychosis. Managing her sanity also means managing that of her husband – a FIFO worker who wasn’t around in the first weeks of the baby’s life.