LITERAL REMAINS

Like a lot of people, I guess, I’ve seen the trailer for the upcoming Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island, an adaptation of the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel, and I thought it looked interesting.  So, as is the case most of the time, I wanted to read the book before I ventured to see the film.

In the Fall of 1954, patient Rachel Salondo goes missing from her room/cell at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, located on Shutter Island.  Solando seems to have simply vanished into thin air.  Solando is a multiple murderess, having killed her three children by way of drowning, then setting them down at the kitchen table for a meal.  It is believed her husband’s death in the war is what finally fractured her mental state and sent her over the edge.  She is missing, and considered highly dangerous.

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is sent to investigate.  Going with him is his new partner, Chuck Aule.  They arrive, by ferry, at Shutter Island just before a hurricane hits.  In the four days that follow, cut off from the rest of the world, Teddy and Chuck try to unlock the mystery of Rachel’s, nearly impossible, disappearance, and they try to pull back the veils of secrecy that shroud Ashecliffe Hospital.

Teddy, though, has his own secrets, primarily his real reason for being there.  It seems he has pulled some strings, and is there to locate another patient, Andrew Laeddis, a pyromaniac.  Laeddis lit ablaze an apartment building, Teddy’s apartment building, and it killed Teddy’s wife, Dolores.  Dolores’s death still haunts Teddy, and it only complicates the investigation.
Shutter Island is my first introduction to Lehane’s work, I’ve not read any of his other novels or seen any of the other film adaptations of his books.  But I think I may check them out.  Shutter Island is stellar book with a nifty little mystery at its heart.  It’s noir, it’s locked room/locked island, it’s deep and more than the pulp I was expecting.  The paranoid, isolated, atmosphere is genuine enough, as is its sense of time and place.

The mystery isn’t too hard to unravel, but the journey to the conclusion is well worth the slower parts.  There were times when I wished it would pick up just a little.  All in all, if you like a good mystery, a good twisty tale, you can’t go wrong with Shutter Island.

4.5 out of 5
the_novacula