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what
Lessing called "inner space fiction", the novel contrasts Watkins's fantastical accounts of his own semi-mystical hallucinations – including being adrift on a raft in the Atlantic and flying through outer space – with the doctors' and nurses' increasingly draconian attempts to sedate and "cure" the patient.
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The novel begins when a well-dressed but dishevelled man is found wandering alone at night on London's
Embankment. Unable to remember anything, he is escorted to a psychiatric hospital, where he is identified as Charles Watkins, a professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. An example of
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described the novel's grappling with questions of sanity and insanity as "less than astonishing stuff". Didion noted parallels between the novel and the writings of
Scottish psychiatrist
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