"Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind?"

I asked my mom to pick something up for me at the library, but they didn't have it and she brought me this instead. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane was recently turned made into a film by Scorsese, which is probably when my mom and dad both originally read it. It follows Atonement and Guernsey... pretty well, being that this book follows those chronologically and takes place in the mid-1950s. In the novel, we follow Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall, going to an island of criminally insane patients to find one of them who has disappeared. It's not a horror novel, but definitely creepy and when I finished I was extremely unsettled. My favorite part of the novel was the intense dreams that Teddy has while on the island. In many movies or books when dreams are shown, they often follow a far more logical and sensible path than real dreams do, with the dreamer being too lucid and reflective within the dream. I enjoyed the experience of many of Lehane's dream sequences. I think he captured how, most of the time, the dreamer follows whatever they encounter without being able to instantly realize that the events occurring completely defy reality. Dream Teddy doesn't find anything wrong with any of the violent, sexual, or just plain bizarre things that he encounters in his dreams, until after he wakes up.

As things get stranger on the island, the big question of the book becomes whether or not Teddy is (going) insane. He has clearly been through a lot, WWII and the death of his wife, but that does not instantly point to insanity. Mental instability? Of course. Full-time resident of crazy town? Not necessarily. Teddy believes that his wife's killer, Andrew Laedis, is a patient on the island and becomes convinced that that the doctors are conducting illegal experiments on the patients.

SPOILER! Eventually, Teddy finds out that they are planning on turning him into the next patient. Teddy meets an ex-doctor hiding in the side of a cliff, while on the run on the island, who told him that he had been receiving drugs since his arrival that were causing him to go a little nutty, which would explain his strange feelings and experiences. When he finally confronts the big doctor, after failing to escape the island, it is revealed that Teddy has actually been a patient here after murdering his wife, and that the past few days were an elaborate act to try to get "Andrew" to remember and accept everything. Him slipping into craziness is "Andrew's" extreme psychosis, or something, acting up. Throughout the book, you can find evidence supporting each of the sides, so which is it? While initially I just thought that he was bonkers, I am now on the side of Teddy being drugged. I think that it's easier to fight the evidence against Teddy on this side, because you can blame most of it on his mind slipping from a heavy drugging. There are a few events that I don't think make sense for the Teddy is coo coo crazy argument. The biggest one being that during an interview that is obviously being watched and was heavily rehearsed, the interviewee scribbles "RUN" on Teddy's notebook when his partner, who is actually a doctor on the island, leaves the table. Why would you want to help a dangerously insane person escape into society? But you really can argue for both sides. I'm just more apt to blame "the man". END.

I zoomed through this book because I was dying to know what happened. If you enjoy thrillers or mysteries, this is a good read. I'm sure it would be a great second read, where you could make lists of the evidence of both sides and you could catch all sorts of new things to support or refute aspects of your argument. What? You mean, this isn't something that regular people do? Oh, bummer.