The Shoe on the Roof

The Shoe On The Roof Will Ferguson 2017, 364 pages.

First a confession. I picked this book up from the library due to a misunderstanding. Years ago I read and enjoyed a book called Onyx John by a Mr Ferguson, whom I remembered as the brother of Reverend Rod Ferguson, my friend, pastor and spiritual advisor for many years when I was a Presbyterian; now I am just Presby(old). But on checking, that was by Trevor Ferguson, probably no relation to Will. I also fail to see any real connection of the plot to the story of the cardiac arrest patient’s out-of-body experience related on the dust jacket and responsible for the title. Perhaps this just emphasizes the important marketing value of the title for any work of fiction.

Will Ferguson is probably is well known to most Canadian bibliophiles as the author of many books including three that have won Leacock awards for humour and one that has won the Giller Prize, but I have not read (or have forgotten) those. I may now have to check some of them out.

This is my kind of story, combining extensive neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, religion, romance (and some fairly graphic sex) and philosophy into a fast-paced unpredictable thriller. And there is abundant humour, but also great insights into the essence of what it means to be human. The fuzzy borders of sanity are blurred, and the characters that are portrayed as mad provide some of the best insights. One remarkable quote among many, from a psychotic patient who is absolutely certain that he is Jesus Christ: “I think society needs people like us to define what normal is. The mad serve a useful role-always have. If madness didn’t exist we would have to invent it. Some might say we have.”

This story is set in Boston at an unspecified time in the past, the only real time clue being the recent publication of the Third Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which would place it somewhere in the 1980s. But, as this was referred to throughout as the SDM 3 not DSM 3, and was supposedly produced by one of the characters, we cannot be precise about the time, and a lot of the neuroscience is of more recent discovery. I presume the obfuscation is deliberate, possibly because the real authors of the DSM would not be amused by its characterization.

There are not a huge number of characters to confuse the reader, but almost all of them seem to border on insanity at some point. A medical sciences student working in a neuroscience laboratory devises a devious plan to become famous by locating god within the human brain and curing three very different psychotics who are all absolutely sure they are god or Jesus, using only cognitive therapy and no pharmaceuticals. Ultimately he is forced to enlist the help of a fellow researcher and then his famous father who is the lead author of the SDM3. The characterization of psychotics within an institution reminded me my time spent living and working at a mental hospital and rings true to me. (I was not a patient there, but might well have qualified for admission.) One of the delusional psychotic Jesus characters even pulls his right eye out obeying the Biblical commandment “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” A psychiatric nurse friend told me, long before this story was written, the true story of a patient who did just that. How much more realistic can fiction get?

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.