The Treatment & The Cure

By Peter Kocan

Book Overview

19-year-old Len Tarbutt is serving a life sentence for attempted homicide. Transferred to the maximum-security ward of a mental hospital, his efforts to survive the system and preserve his individuality are movingly and often humorously portrayed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933372451
• ISBN13: 9781933372457
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.0" x 5.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Disturbing but cathartic

'The Treatment and the Cure' is a very special novel, both for its straightforward and often humorous portrayal of a mentally disturbed young man and also the glimpse it offers the reader into the daily goings on of a hospital for the criminally insane. Kocan, like the main character in the book, was institutionalized for attempted murder. In the 1970's he unsuccessfully tried to assassinate the Labour politician Arthur Caldwell. During his time in hospital he discovered poetry and eventually published some of the finest volumes of post- World War 2 poetry in Australia. Among his collections are 'The other side of the fence' (1975), probably the best poetic evocation of life in a mental institution produced by an Australia poet, with the possible exception of Francis Webb's 'Ward Two', and also the more recent 'Fighting in the Shade'. The novel is disturbing in its subject matter, but also cathartic when we begin to glimpse the humanity of the inmates. It has something of the frivolity and anarchy of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, yet it has a darker and more disquietning undertone. This is not a hospital of mute Indians or neurotic teenagers. We are given an insight into the conversations and lives of murderers and psychopaths, yet somehow we also sense their humanity and that they are, in some way, not so unlike ourselves. Given their situation and upbringing we may have become one of them. The book is an intimate account of how the human mind can heal itself, and of how a socially isolated and troubled young man was rehabilitated through his love of poetry and nature. History may judge 'The Treatment and the Cure' to be one of the finest and humane novels to come out of Australia.