With Spooks in Mind

The Times of London

Weekend Saturday

Books

 

With Spooks in Mind

 

by Erica Wagner

 

 

Without its extraordinary preface and the detailed acknowledgements at tits end, this novel – despite its author's talents – might be hard to credit.  The events which put its plot into motion are almost too fantastic to believe, but they are true.

 

During the 1950's and 1960's, terrified by what it believed was the communists' ability to turn fine, upstanding Americans into raving Reds the Central Intelligence Agency ran an extended series of experiments in mind control, based mainly at a large psychiatric center in Canada.  The patients at this centre, who had been admitted for minor disorders such as post-natal depression, were never asked for their consent and were unaware that the treatments were for anything other than their benefit.  

 

These unwitting guineas-pigs, often kept in hospital against their will, were given huge doses of LSD and PCP, repeated electroshoc therapy and submitted to “psychic driving”.  All these experiments were overseen by Dr. Ewan Cameron, the powerful Scots-American doctor whose patriotism made him a pawn of the agency.

 

Elizabeth Nickson's mother was one of Cameron's patients, though this is the story of a fictional patient, Victoria Ramsey, and her fictional daughter Catherine as they work their way through the minefiled that was the lawsuit brought against the CIA in 1979, a suit that was won in 1990.  It is a story that is both personal and political, partly a psychological journey into the difficult and damaged relationsip between mother and daughter, partly a thriller with all the stops pulled out.

 

The Monkey Puzzle Tree, a first novel, is a gripping tale, well told.  Nickson writes powerully of Catherine's childhood love and fear for her mother, setting this against her adult desire to leave old wounds half-healed.

 

But Catherine, a journalist like her creator, cannot resist the pull of the truth.  She reads her way into the experiments horrifying files and find the secrets of her childhood revealed; finds the mother she thought she had lost long ago.

 

Nickson states in her preface that the Montreal experiments, and the trial that resulted from them, deserve to be better known.  She is correct, but what follows is a fine novel that deserves to be read in its own right.