![]() ![]() The mental institution described in Woman on the Edge of Time feels like one of those. They say that when a cure for syphilis was discovered, 90% of the mental institutions in the UK closed. US state psychiatric care in the 1970s was hardly state of the art, but as depicted in the novel it does indeed read like it belongs several decades earlier. ![]() ![]() These sections of the novel are pure One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962, USA) by Ken Kesey - staff not trained to deal with their charges, a regimen of abuse and neglect, and a level of psychiatric care more common to the 1920s than the 1970s. After a violent incident with her niece, actually instigated by the niece’s pimp, Connie is remanded to a mental institution on the instruction of her brother. Much of the novel is taken up with Connie’s visits to Luciente’s world.īut things don’t go so well for Connie in 1970s New York. This link allows them to visit Connie in their time, or bring Connie forward to the future they inhabit. ![]() One day, Connie meets a person, Luciente, whose gender she cannot immediately determine, who claims to come from the future, and who has a psychic link with Connie. Connie has had good times, but each one has been torpedoed by a man, or by the system because she does not have a man. Her niece is a sex worker, abused and misused by her boyfriend/pimp but incapable of recognising it, and her brother, a successful businessman, would sooner pretend his sister does not exist. Connie, Consuela Ramos, is a poor Latina woman living in New York. ![]()
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