Inside Broadmoor

Jonathan Levi & Emma French, 2019

This is going to be a slightly more critical one. In fact, I almost didn’t write it at all.

I’ve got two rules when it comes to deciding whether or not to write about a book on here:

1) I have to finish it

2) I have to have enjoyed it

So I meet both criteria, given that I’ve finished it and I’ve enjoyed it – but my hesitation comes as a consequence of the book having been somewhat poorly written.

I feel like an asshole just saying that.

This book provides us with a genuine insight into the innermost workings of Broadmoor, which is precisely what the book sets out to do. So I can’t be too hard on it in that regard; it does what it says it wants to. I can’t help but feel like it leaves us with more questions that it answers though. More often than not these are questions raised within the pages of the book itself, where one of the authors will ask us to consider how we feel about such-and-such and whether we think this-that-or-the-other is acceptable - questions which it doesn’t even attempt to answer.

Consequently, I came away feeling like my understanding was surface level. Skin deep. I came away having known more than I did about the hospital before I read the book, but that’s not saying much. I didn’t know anything to begin with, so having come away knowing something new isn’t much of an achievement.

I really enjoyed the way the book handled the patients’ and the staff’s stories. Like they were both two integral parts of the hospital. I also liked how they consistently re-enforced the fact that Broadmoor is a hospital and not, in fact, a prison.

For me, the book was at its most interesting when talking about how admissions rates have dropped, because the courts are more hesitant to proscribe ‘unusual’ or extremely bizarre acts of violence to a mental health condition. In the 1980s, if someone murdered a child and tried to cannibalise the corpse then the courts would have said they were mentally ill, and sent them to Broadmoor. Now they’re more likely to say they’re not mentally ill, they just need to be in prison. So Broadmoor admissions have dropped staggeringly, and the average stay is down to about 5 or 6 years. It’s worth noting, however, that this isn’t 5 or 6 years in the hospital and then turfed back out into society – this is 5 or 6 years in a hospital, and then the rest of their life in a prison.

The book raises the interesting point that a lot of criminals see the ‘insanity plea’ or whatever they call it now as a cop out. Like it’ll be easier than ‘actual’ prison. The book points out that someone admitted to a prison will serve their sentence and then go home; but someone admitted to the hospital will spend the rest of their life bouncing between institutions, running the risk of never being released at all.

It was also kind of weird in how it handled the patients. It didn’t want to glorify what they’d done or in any way give in to sensationalism, but it definitely treated its ‘celebrity patients’ differently from the nameless-faceless ones. Like they knew Peter Sutcliffe was their money shot, and weren’t afraid to tell some stories about the Krays. So it wasn’t trying to be sensationalist, and it did a good job of not being so, but it definitely made it seem like these criminals were ‘special’ in a way that regular criminals aren’t.

Those are the nice things I have to say about the book.

There are some not-so-nice, though…

I don’t feel like this book was proof read. I don’t know who the editor was, but this book feels like it’s a mess. The first third of the book was pretty solid, and I have no complaints. But from then onwards it gets a little… weird. Sloppy, even.

On pages 90 and 93, they quote the same guy having said the same thing, twice. They then do it again on pages 94 and 95. These pages are so close together, and reading the same sentences that many times it just weird. Then on page 96 we see the sentence: ‘[b]elieve it or not, there some patients for whom even intensive care is not a high enough level of supervision’.

‘there some’

I don’t think this was proof read, and if it was, then it should have been double-checked.

On page 168, we get the interesting sentence: ‘[t]he inner perimeter is marked by a very high, very high-tech, and highly intimidating steel fence running inside the hospital’s brick outer walls’.

Does this sound weird to you? Read it out loud. Do you feel how weird it is? You might not even know why it’s weird, but you can probably see that it is. It uses the word ‘high’ three times (if we include ‘highly’) in just once sentence, as well as sticking ‘very’ together with two uses.

‘The inner perimeter is marked by a very high, very high-tech, and highly intimidating steel fence...'

It’s just bad writing. It’s not the author’s fault, because that’s what it’s like when you’re writing. You get caught up in what you’re doing and don’t give it a seconds’ thought. It’s the editor’s fault. Again. You’re supposed to catch that stuff.

On page 170 we see the author re-using a quote once again, from earlier in the book. This makes us feel like they’re either lacking in primary source material or they’ve forgotten what they’ve already said.

OR:

Different chapters were written by different people.

This is my own pet theory for which I have no real proof.

The book lists Jonathan Levi and Emma French as its authors – usually this would suggestion a collaboration. In this instance, I think they opted for the slightly more unusual approach of ‘you write a chapter, I write a chapter’.

The writing styles between chapters are different, they’re re-using quotations and re-telling stories. Re-introducing staff we’ve already met and re-telling horror stories they’ve already touched on.

This book feels like it was written by two people who didn’t read each other's work, and didn’t know what the other person was going to say or what sources they would use. It’s a mess, and it’s the editor’s fault. I’m going to stick by that. If a book is a mess, it’s not the author’s fault (well, it is, but marginally less so). The editor gets the raw material and has to work it into something coherent. They haven’t.

Some parts of the book were very well written indeed. The chapter devoted to Jimmy Saville’s influence in the hospital was wonderfully written, and I have no issues with any of the choices made in that chapter. It felt like it had one voice, one author, and knew what it wanted to say. Fantastic. Shame the rest couldn’t have been handled the same way. Either Emma French or Jonathan Levi is a better writer than the other, and we don’t know which one, but it would have been nice if that one had written the whole book.