Paperback of the week: Bedlam – A Novel by Jennifer Higgie

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was one of a handful of images that survived successive waves of redecoration of my teenage bedroom. Star Wars gave way to the Jesus and Mary Chain, The Lord of the Rings to Reservoir Dogs, but this densely patterned scene of tiny green- and grey-skinned figures, partly obscured amid grass stalks and daisies – some of them normally proportioned, others with oddly bulbous or bizarrely distorted features – maintained its hold on me. All I knew of its creator, the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, was that he murdered his father and spent most of his life in asylums.

Jennifer Higgie’s novel Bedlam, first published by the specialist art imprint Sternberg Press in 2006, and now reissued by Verso, concentrates on the 10-month tour through Europe and the Middle East that Dadd undertook at the age of 25. By this stage, he already had a reputation as a painter – he was admitted to the Royal Academy aged just 20 – but by the time he returned to London he was experiencing psychotic delusions: he believed he was being followed and that he was receiving instructions from the Egyptian god Osiris. In August 1843, while out walking with his father in the Kent village of Cobham, he stabbed the older man to death.

Higgie, a curator and art writer as well as a novelist (she used to edit Frieze magazine), captures the odd cast of Dadd’s mind with great subtlety and power. In Ostend, he either imagines or suspects – the uncertainty is deliberate – the city’s fishermen to be impostors playing at the role. If they are, he wonders “who dug them up, who washed them so well”; a thought the origin and meaning of which is chillingly hard to parse. People’s voices in Italy sound “like bubbling oil”. Falling asleep in a German inn, he thinks: “Everything in my room is wood, except me.”

Dadd’s mother died when he was a child, his stepmother when he was in his teens. His relationship with one of his sisters, 15-year-old Maria, is particularly intense. Leaving for the continent, he finds her eyes “so wet and desperate I can hardly bear her presence”.

On his tour, he seems very attuned to young women, registering looks he considers freighted with meaning. But his need for female contact is also a kind of objectification. In Alexandria, he notes that the lack of women “has made me hungry for their company”, but what is it he really wants from them? Not conversation, apparently, which demands a “propriety that I find exhausting. If only you could sit quietly with one,” he thinks, “and simply look. I need to breathe one in, from a narrow distance.” The choice of pronoun makes him sound vampiric.

This desire, unsated by the vagaries of chance meetings and abortive attempts at conversation, leads eventually to a more dependable destination: the brothel he visits alongside his pompous companion, Sir Thomas. There they have sex with girls who are “probably the same age as my sisters”. For several days afterwards, the pair are excessively polite to one another, trying to cancel their shame with civility.

From here on, Dadd’s decline steepens, but he is still well enough to know that something is deeply wrong. “Living inside my head,” he thinks, “is like dwelling in a serene and well-run household, that unfortunately has built into its foundations a few haunted rooms.”

With increasing frequency, these are the rooms he finds himself roaming. Finally back in London, the real and unreal switch with baffling fluidity. “Everything that exists,” he writes, “whispers to me.”

Higgie’s novel is admirably restrained, conveying sympathy for Dadd without dulling or seeking to explain the terrifying chaos of his thoughts. It was in London’s Bethlem hospital (the Bedlam of the title) and later Broadmoor that he produced his beautiful, puzzling, troubling art.

As he notes at the start of the novel: “My pictures describe me correctly.”

Bedlam: A Novel by Jennifer Higgie is published by Verso Books (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by incamerastock, painting by Richard Dadd