The Silent Patient
WatchlistI had high expectations when I picked up The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. I love mysteries and thrillers. There was a lack of quality content in this space in recent times. This was the winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 under that category. It had great reviews and the blurbs on the book made it hard to resist. “I am in for a great ride”, I thought.
It was a page-turner for sure. The premise was interesting. I was sold. Alicia Berenson kills her husband one night. No one knows why. They had a seemingly perfect life. But more importantly she hasn’t uttered a single word since then. The only statement she ever gives is in the form of a painting titled The Alcestis.
Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist, is hell bent on making sure that she talks again and is convinced that he is the only one who can. Does he do it? Does he find out why Alicia killed her husband? Everything was perfectly setup for an intellectual cat and mouse game.
And it was one for the most part. The writing is simple, clean and to the point. The chapters are Quite small and almost always end with a major revelation, twist or cliff-hanger. It just forces you to keep going. The ending being the reason for all the buzz around this book.
As I read the book, I found myself trying to piece together everything that is happening, just like Theo. And somewhere along the way I did think of this ending. It relies on a central conceit that you hopefully don’t see. The story keeps evolving in various other directions that, on a casual read, you probably will never see it coming!
So does this mean, I think that this is a perfect mystery? One of the important aspects of a great mystery is the sense of satisfaction that you get once it is solved. This book is definitely worth reading but when it ended, I had this feeling that something was missing.
Writing a review or an opinion is hard. Writing one without spoilers is even harder. And with this book anymore information could turn out to be a potential spoiler. Though I try to actively avoid spoilers in the next section, if you found the premise interesting, stop reading and come back once you have finished reading the book.
Any thriller will usually contain a bunch of seemingly unrelated storylines that eventually connect in someway. This book centers on three such threads. All the threads focus on a particular relationship: Alicia and her husband, Theo and his wife, Alicia and Theo. The beauty and ingeniousness of this book lies in the fact that it does a good job in convincing you that they are 3 different threads.
The first one, the cause of all the action. The second one, a look at what can happen when work takes over your life and the third, the work itself. There are only a handful of characters in the book and most of the action is around Alicia and Theo. The characters can also be segregated into the three threads. The mystery unfolds as the characters cross these well-defined boundaries. But that is hardly one or two characters.
There are a lot of things that I liked about this book. On a quick retrospect of the actual timeline of events, I couldn’t immediately see any major issues. And that’s good. Although the ending is a major twist that makes you rethink everything you read, that central conceit - A play on the timeline of events - has been done before. And I don’t mean that in a bad way either.
One book that I was reminded of, while reading this, was The Prestige by Christopher Priest. The movie adaptation differs from the book in some significant ways. The book is basically two diaries - Angier’s and Borden’s. The Silent Patient also features a diary - Alicia Berenson’s diary. In both books, the diaries are used to play around with the actual timeline of events. Now that I think of it, this is probably what tipped me off. There seems to be a live-action adaptation of this book in development as well. It would be interesting to see how it turns out!
The Silent Patient is definitely a book worth reading irrespective of the twist. Aside from the plot, I really liked the structure - clean, simple and short chapters that end with a bang! There is a very apt quote from the book that can be used to summarise it as well:
It was a remarkable story. Whether you choose to believe it or not, is completely upto you!
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