Mind games

Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall enjoys the dubious status of a modern classic. A black mental-health patient, Christopher, is about to be freed from a clinic but his cautious young shrink, Bruce, wants to keep him under observation. His senior colleague, Robert, thinks a dose of the big bad world will help to cure the nervy, delusional Christopher, who claims Idi Amin as his father and insists that all oranges are blue. He’s clearly unstable and though he’s highly irascible he hasn’t yet threatened himself, or anyone else, so he deserves his freedom. It’s the kind of knife-edge conundrum faced by clinicians every day.

Then, a twist. Robert professes support for R.D. Laing, who argued that insanity was a fiction, a form of cultural libel, used by the self-deluding majority as a pretext to lock up outcasts and weaklings under the guise of compassionate assistance. With Christopher as a lab rat, Robert hopes to test a new theory that bipolarity among black men is fomented by white prejudice.