"One flew over the cuckoo's nest" by Ken Kesey

This is the story of how a petty criminal called McMurphy blags his way into a mental asylum with a psychopath diagnosis because he thinks it will be a cushy alternative to the work farm. But he is a natural rebel and refuses to fit in with the rules of Big Nurse Ratched, even after he realises that he had been Committed and will never get out unless she endorses his sanity. So he and Big Nurse lock horns. She is for order and control and he is for laughter and gambling. She keeps the patients bullied and downtrodden; he tries to free them.

The story is narrated by a giant half-Indian who plays deaf and dumb. He remembers his old life in the hills and forests and rivers of Oregon before the government "tried to buy their right to be Indians" and build a hydro-electric scheme on their river. Now he sees and hears the machinery whirring as the Combine process human beings in their factory.

Because this book is about who controls us and how they control us and how we are complicit in our own control (most of the patients are voluntary but they are too frightened of the world outside to be able to escape from this frankly horrible ward). Big Nurse is the symbol of totalitarian authority. McMurphy is the little man against the system, the rebel who adopts a cause, the joker, the spirit of chaos who always threatens to destroy the world that we have organised. You want him to win so much.

Brilliant book: strong characters in a gripping plot with some laugh out loud moments and an ending to make one mad.

April 2012; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God