The madness of Charlotte Randall's methods

Former psychology researcher Charlotte Randall explores in her novels ways of treating mental illness. She talks to MARGIE THOMSON.

The second career of Wellington writer Charlotte Randall is going well, and it's clear that when she tossed in her first in psychological research, she made a good call. Her first novel, Dead Sea Fruit, won the East Asian/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, and her second, The Curative (Penguin, $24.95), is shortlisted for the Montana Book Award to be announced this week.

Both Randall's novels have contained (amid the marvellous story-telling) serious questions about therapy and cure for psychological illness or, as it used to be called, madness.

In Dead Sea Fruit, parents from disintegrating families seek psychological assistance. In The Curative, the hapless William Lonsdale, sane, yet incarcerated for nearly 15 years in London's fearsome Bedlam asylum, receives what seem to us now barbaric "cures" before he is pronounced "incurable" and sent to a living death in a cold cell where he hangs shackled to the wall, "like the crucifixion".

In his first year at the institution he is afflicted with treatments ranging from drenching in freezing deluges of water, to being drugged with opium and alcohol, spun on a gyrator, scalded and cut on his head by heated glass cups, his blood let, and forced to swallow emetics and hellebore purges - all methods that, 200 years later, we dismiss with disdain and horror. Even, Randall notes with irritation, with disbelief in the case of one reviewer who questioned the efficacy of her account. Of course, she didn't invent these horrors, but carefully researched the period.

The notion of questioning whether a cure is a cure is one of the messages in The Curative. "We believe in the latest theory," her apothecary's assistant says; "It's good because it is done," Lonsdale muses following one dreadful treatment; "You are so infatuated with your treatments you have forgotten to examine their effects," he accuses his would-be helpers.

"That's what you've been raving on about for years, and you're right," a psychiatrist friend of Randall told her after reading the book.

"Yes, well, everyone can see that so clearly when you're talking about 1815, that the treatments are bad and not curing him," Randall says. "But people have a lot more difficulty in the present time working out whether what they consider to be therapy is having a beneficial effect. I'm not talking necessarily about what psychologists and psychiatrists give out - they are subjected to rigorous supervision - but all the weird and wonderful therapists and counsellors who are out there.

"The notion that you should look to see if your therapy's beneficial is laughable to some of them. 'It's good because it's done: I did it and therefore people must benefit from it.' Yeah, right. It's easy to consider yourself scientifically correct in the present, but if you think you might escape the scorn of the future, well, I wouldn't be too sure."

Randall gained a degree in psychology from Canterbury University and completed research projects for the medical schools at Christchurch and Wellington. She is not afraid of debate, of ideas. Lonsdale is an acerbic character, a man of strong opinions - not to mention his roguishness, his "weakness for his own pleasure", as Randall puts it.

"Being him was easy," she says of her 10 months in his company, he hanging in his cell, she sitting at her computer. "I'm not exactly a shrinking-violet personality myself and so I just shot my mouth off as much as I could, being him, and I enjoyed that."

Questions arise about freedom, about happiness. - "The burden of happiness ... all wrapping and no content," as Lonsdale puts it.

"For most people, happiness is a tantalising vision of when you get free, of when the shackles come off, but those shackles can be anything, not just the shackles tying a man in a mental hospital. So you think why do you have to wait till then, and that has relevance to one's ordinary life. Why am I waiting to be happy; what's going to get better? Probably nothing!"

Similarly, considering the matter of freedom, Lonsdale taunts his keeper, Porlock, with wasting his freedom on "food or fannies or flight", yet admits that he himself might, if he got the chance, do nothing with his own freedom, were he to get it again.

Randall lives with her husband and two children, aged 10 and 12, in the Wellington suburb of Petone. She is writing her third novel, a re-telling of the Faustian bargain, called Within the Kiss, working at Victoria University where she is writer in residence in the Institute of Modern Letters.

The university position, like being on the shortlist for the Montana, "validates and vindicates" her as a writer. It's a message which goes into battle with a meaner voice in her head, that of "common authorial doubt", which tries to tell her, "You can't do it, you can't pull this book off".

But she can do it, and she does pull it off, spectacularly. And sometimes, as when the Montana shortlist was announced, the former psychological researcher can quell that nagging little voice with the happier positivity of "Oh, I can write!"

* The winners of the annual Montana Books Awards will be announced on Tuesday. The other titles in the shortlist for best fiction are: Belief, Stephanie Johnson (Vintage); Nineteen Widows Under Ash, Damien Wilkins (Victoria University Press); Room, Laurence Fearnley (Victoria University Press); The Book of Fame, Lloyd Jones (Penguin). With no frontrunner obvious, some pundits suggest that The Curative could be a fancied outsider.