This essay was originally published on 4 December 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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Literature got to the fragility of the self before philosophy and science (psychology). Exactly when is hard to say because these things come incrementally from afar, and there are many literatures in this world. Dostoyevsky must certainly be in there, starting with his first novel, The Double, but I don’t think that I’m overly fanciful when I assert that one of the finest and most coherent exponents was perhaps Pirandello. One of his novels is entirely devoted to this concept, Uno, nessuno e centomila (in English: Someone, No One and One Hundred Thousand). “Someone” is the self as we normally understand it or perhaps as only that particular self perceives it. Every other self encountered will perceive that particular self in their own way, and that is where we find the “hundred thousand” – a case of literary exaggeration because none of us know, however slightly, one hundred thousand people even in a very long and itinerant life. Ultimately we discover to our horror that the self does not exist and here we have the “no one” or nobody. I would like to suggest a compromise position: the self does exist but in the same way that a river exists, that is to say that the water is never the same water, and moreover the depth is always changing. Erosion causes the river occasionally to change its course, but normally changes are not so dramatic, and this is also true of the self. The river is never exactly the same, but we more or less know where it is and what it looks like. 

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s excellent novel, Case Study, deals with this problem with charm, wit and depth, the latter arising mainly from the insanities that can occur when such ideas are taken too far, particularly in the hands of his deeply flawed protagonist or anti-hero, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, whose story is principally set in the sixties, several decades after the concept had had some battering. I once read parts of a book called The Self Rediscovered and I thought of this when I read the very entertaining episode in which Braithwaite mocks a visitor who claims to have lost her “self” by his running around the room looking for where it might be hidden (he insists on calling patients “visitors”). Macrae Burnet is concerned with something perhaps even more interesting than that particularly fecund period for subverting established beliefs in psychology: the intellectual acrobatics, professional rivalries and undoubted shenanigans as they unfolded in that period (the era of R.D. Laing seems very appropriate but the author sensibly keeps him at arm’s length).  

In the “Second Notebook” of this novel, the narrative voice comments on Collins Braithwaite, “He drags in Sophocles, Plato, Freud and Jung, but he never truly engages with any of the authors he quotes” (p. 120). In this Braithwaite happened to be somewhat similar to the novelist by which I mean not necessarily this novelist but novelists in general, who research but not too much, as an impressionist painter uses a brush to describe a landscape or the feeling of a landscape. In my initial publicity material for Vagabond Voices I wrote, “Novelists do not always resemble vagabonds literally, although many do. But like vagabonds, they are itinerant always in their minds and often geographically too. They move quickly across a landscape, recording it, examining it and often misunderstanding it, because it is not the job of the novelist to utter the final truth on anything, but rather to go in search of small truths while leaving some work for their creative partners: the readers.” Case Study certainly conforms to that idea; you do not have to have read those authors to read and enjoy this book. 

Graeme Macrae Burnet loves language – that is the English language – and here, thank God, is a writer who hasn’t been infected by the barren prose of Raymond Carver and his far-too-clever publisher and editor. There is a range of vocabulary and a range of register. And there is no human activity he does not want to observe, including sex though it is never even remotely pornographic. Pornography titillates and presumably encourages you to go elsewhere leaving your book behind you, and suspense holds you too powerfully to the book, so you can’t put it down as you scramble over the sentences, barely noticing them as they fly by. Case Study does neither of those things, as it invites you into its absurd but entirely believable reality and allows you to sit in it and savour the story, the language and questions it poses. It also allows you to put it down, because we all have to go off and do other things, but to some extent it stays with you as every good novel should. Macrae Burnet, bless him, even tells you what’s going to happen to some characters long before whatever is supposed to happen happens. 

There is an account of a then teenage girl masturbating on a train. It is full of pathos and suggests that even the most repressed of individuals are only seemingly in control of their dull, routine-laden lives. In fact Case Study is not a humanistic work, but neither is it misanthropic. It is somewhere in the middle. Given that in the last twenty years the humanistic (let alone the socialistic) has become decidedly out of fashion, as Terry Eagleton once observed, you could argue that this novel is about as humanistic as a modern novel can get. There is something of Waugh in it, but Waugh despised his characters (especially the one who represented himself); Macrae Burnet does not, and sometimes he even likes them, in spite of their faults and demonstrable prejudices (I personally adhere to the idea that we must love all our characters, even those who are evil, but I am a solitary figure on the margins of current taste). When I say “like” or “love”, I mean an attempt to explain, to understand, to humanise, but not necessarily to justify. 

Macrae Burnet is now a successful novelist and this novel should secure his place in the literary firmament, but this is not a given in these shallow and politically correct times. Firstly he quite correctly adopts the mores of the times in which the book is set, which are of course an anathema to our own. Given that people even want to judge eighteenth and nineteenth-century works in the light of contemporary beliefs (leaving aside the fact that some of the ideas of those times now seem more enlightened than our own), the possibility of some readers misinterpreting the author’s intentions are not inconsiderable. As Salvatore Settis points out in The Future of the 'Classical', which I had the great good luck to translate, the past is also an “other” which we have to respect and understand, but not distort by replacing their prejudices with our own equally questionable ones. In the West our haughty and monolithic view of the past is no different from our equally haughty and monolithic view of the countries that don’t share our Western end-of-history moral strictures – in other words all the world that isn’t ourselves. 

But Macrae Burnet has done something remarkable that most people will not detect: he has written a “historical novel” set in the recent past. This is not an easy thing to do, particularly for a youngish writer, because there are a lot of older people who remember those times. You can set your novel in the nineteenth century and you’re as free as if you had set it on another planet (within reason). Even historians of that period don’t know that much, certainly not as much as the people who lived in those periods did, although the historians of today obviously have a better idea of where those people were going (I do not say this to belittle historians; they are doing an important job and Settis was right in that quote: we need to try to understand the past – including the classical past – in order to understand ourselves and others). 

Macrae Burnet has made a brilliant job of this task, and he avoids the mistake of exploring too many social realities (though he has a range of them). I read a novel on the revolutionary left in the seventies but written in the early 2000s, and the author wandered into territory that he was not familiar with and possibly couldn’t have been familiar with, and this error spoilt the novel and the eminently sensible things he wanted to say. Getting back to our novel, however, I’m pretty sure that the cappuccino had not arrived in 1965 Britain. It was not until 1967 and 1968 that I was hanging about espresso bars in the same inconclusive and haphazard manner as his young characters (as this story of the cappuccino is a reminiscence it must have occurred even further back, possibly in the late fifties). As I remember it and taking into account that other great theme – the unreliability of human memory, there were “espresso bars” at the time and they had Italian coffee machines but they didn’t make Italian coffee, by which I mean espressos and cappuccinos. They kept the hot water going until a British mug was filled and then a bit of cold milk was thrown in. The cappuccino had not yet colonised the world, much as Coca-Cola had already done. But that’s a niggling unimportant point, and the scene otherwise seemed to me convincing. 

If I wanted to be critical of this book, I could argue that the author combines the innocence of that time with the cynicism of today, because it was a time of great optimism and hope. It was a “mass society” in which people really did believe in society. However such a criticism would be unreasonable. This is not a history book, and besides some novelists did the same kind of jaundiced satires at the time, most notably Kingsley Amis. Macrae Burnet has a perfect right to choose his time and his approach and style, while avoiding the pitfalls I’ve mentioned. The novel works so well because it is not primarily about the sixties, but rather about a time when society had unrealistic hopes of science in general and psychology in particular. He has that balance that is essential for good writing, and so he doesn’t go too far, and what he does do, works wonderfully. He conjures up a past as in a dream or for some of us a genuine memory. 

Another strength of this book is complexity: the obnoxious Collins Braithwaite, for instance, is not entirely wrong in his assertions about contemporary psychological practices, at least as far as many of us are concerned. The practice of pathologising harmless but unusual behaviour is still with us, and it is still being challenged, though the breakthrough never quite arrives. Yet Braithwaite is horribly manipulative and desperate to be the centre of attention, something that he achieves with purpose and Machiavellian cunning. This takes us to the “divided self”: Jung said that everyone is both introvert and extrovert, albeit in differing proportions. We have all behaved badly in our lives – perhaps with a little help from alcohol – and we have all been unnecessarily timorous and/or desirous of our own company. Braithwaite, poor man, had too little of the latter and eventually this comes at a cost. 

Allan Cameron, November 2022

Header image: cover of Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Saraband, 2021)