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The
Monkey Puzzle Tree
By
Elizabeth Nickson
Knopf
Canada,
277 pages, $27
Fiction, it is said, can express a kind of truth beyond the reach of facts,
no matter how carefully they are marshaled. The conventions of reporting
mean that even when writers thoroughly catalog and calibrate their subjects’
emotional responses, they still cannot offer interior monolog or vividly
evoke an emotional state. Which leads some nonfiction authors to use
novelistic techniques to convey the emotional truth of real-life stories,
and to bill their essentially factual books as novels. That is how Truman
Capote came to produce In Cold Blood, and what prompted Elizabeth
Nickson to write her first novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree.
Nickson’s work deals with a staggering atrocity: the American CIA’s mind-control
experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute during the 1950s and
1960s. In 1957, a gang of Cold Warriors began trying to duplicate
behavior-modification techniques developed in the Soviet Union and North
Korea, using psychiatric patients at the Allan as unwitting subjects. In
1979. nine of the patients involved in those experiments filed a
public-interest suit seeking damages for having had their brains toyed with.
Anne Collins’s 1988 nonfiction work, In The Sleep Room, tells the
story meticulously and effectively. But Nickson, whose own mother was a
victim of the program, opted for fiction in her desire to explore the human
wreckage that it left.
Canadian-born Nickson, formerly a writer for Time and Life,
and now a freelance writer based in Bermuda, brings a keen eye for telling
detail and a grace with the language to her story of Victoria Ramsey, a
fictional patient of the real-life Dr. Ewen Cameron. Funded by the CIA,
Cameron headed the mind-control study, scorching patients’ brains with
cortex-immolating doses of LSD and then brain-washing them. After several
short stays at the Allan Memorial, where she has sought help for depression,
Victoria struggles to continue being a mother to three children and to hold
a fractious clan together, while rebuilding her shattered psyche.
Nickson tells Victoria’s story from the point of view of her daughter,
Catherine. And because the author has opted for the freedom of fiction, she
is able to intricately explore the emotional and moral repercussions of
Victoria’s ordeal—the complex dynamics within the family, the bonds between
mother and daughter, the banality of the evil embodied by the Allan program.
Initially, Catherine’s narration has a sawed-off, wire-service-dispatch
efficiency. But her voice becomes increasingly tender and poetic as the
story moves deeper into the characters’ emotional lives. The novel ends with
the plaintiffs’ overdue legal victory after 11 years of official denial and
costly courtroom maneuvering. That they have won at all is a ringing
victory; that they had to fight is an ineradicable tragedy.
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