COVER PAGE

THE COMFORTS OF MADNESS

BY

PAUL SAYER

The Comforts of Madness is the unvoiced monologue of a 33-year-old catatonic patient in a mental hospital ... Peter’s moving dissertation bears witness to a world which denies all rights to the mentally ill ... Lucidly and economically written, Paul Sayer’s novel is a remarkable achievement.

The Sunday Times

Paul Sayer’s powerful and challenging novel is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”, another short work that takes on such endless themes as art, appetite, volition and the death-in-life that is psychosis. Like Kafka’s story, “The Comforts of Madness” is wild, extreme, and slightly unbelievable, yet it rings absolutely true.

New York Times

Undoubtedly gripping and, in the best way, shocking.

The Independent

The Comforts of Madness is surely sad, but enthralling in its excellence.

New York Newsday

Sayer’s extraordinary achievement is to have combined a deep imaginative empathy with a vigorous unsociological broadside on the treatment of the mentally ill, and to have done so quite without sentimentality.

The Times

The Comforts of Madness compares to Camus’s “The Stranger”.

Los Angeles Times

A remarkable first novel.

The Guardian

First published in Great Britain 1988 by Constable and Company Limited 10 Orange Street, London WC2H 7EG

Copyright © 1988 by Paul Sayer

Set in Linotron Palatino 11 pt by Rowland Phototypesetting Limited Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

British Library CIP data

Sayer, paul

The comforts of madness

I. Title

823’.914[F]

ISBN 0 09 468480 4

eBook ISBN 9780094684805

To Anne and Simon

THE COMFORTS OF MADNESS

ONE

I had hoped to remain unturned, but it was not to be.

The night nurse came with the first ashes of dawn, ripping back the bedcovers, sighing audibly then tossing back the counterpane while he went in search of clean linen. I had fouled the bed, but it would not be much; I did not shit much, was never one for it, a smear on the pad, a marble on the draw sheet, nothing more. The heavy young man returned saying, ‘Come on, out of it.’ He re-exposed my nakedness, cupped one hand behind my neck and with his other gripped one of my rigid, crossed forearms to pull me up into a sitting position at the side of the bed. By clamping my head under his arm he was able to rustle up the draw sheet behind me and position the clean one across more than half the mattress. He picked up my legs, forcing me on to my back and heaved me over the hillock of wet cloth, leaving me lying on my other side. He whipped the wet linen on to the floor, made one frustrated effort at trying to straighten my legs which had a habit of contracting up beneath me when I was in bed, before neatly replacing the sheet, blanket, and counterpane and returning about his weary business of checking the rest of the patients in the dormitory.