‘What an astonishing work OCTOPUS MAN is. Schizophrenia is not an easy condition to write about. It scares us. It scares those who live with it even more. But there is a kind of beauty, comedy and transcendence in the way that Jasper Gibson takes us inside the mind of Tom, which lifts the spirits and shows that disorders like his can give as well as take away.’ Stephen Fry
‘Funny. Disturbing. Brilliant.’ Lily Allen
‘What a brilliant and necessary book. A funny, heart-expanding story of a man trapped between the God-like voice in his head and society's desire for him to be “normal”. It's a deeply compassionate portrait and I felt the frustration of battling a broken mental healthcare system, and the guilt and hope of everyone who loves poor, cheeky, troubled Tom and wants so badly for him to get better.’
Douglas Stuart, author of SHUGGIE BAIN and winner of the Booker Prize
'The Octopus Man reminds us that behind the words "mental health" lies a universe of wild creativity, humanity, and spanking big life. A beautiful thing, this is The Dharma Bums meet Clozapine. Now is the time for this book.'
DBC Pierre, author of VERNON GOD LITTLE, winner of the MAN Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award
*The Octopus Man has been optioned by Working Title*
The Octopus Man by Jasper Gibson
Paperback / Weidenfeld & Nicolson / 19 May £8.99
I put my hand against the hot patch and return to prayer, closing my eyes to concentrate on my breathing and think only of His love. I love you with all my heart. Please keep me from triggering. Please keep me from madness.
Once an outstanding law student Tom is now lost in the machinery of the British mental health system, talking to a voice no one else can hear: the voice of Malamock, the Octopus God – sometimes cruel, sometimes loving, but always there to guide him.
After a florid psychotic break, the pressure builds for Tom to take part in an experimental drugs trial that promises to silence the voice forever. But no one, least of all Tom, is prepared for what happens when the Octopus God is seriously threatened.
Deeply moving and tragi-comic, The Octopus Man takes us into the complex world of voice-hearing in a bravura literary performance that asks the fundamental questions about belief, meaning, and love.
About Jasper Gibson
Jasper Gibson was born in the Peak District, Derbyshire in 1975. He is the author of one previous novel, A BRIGHT MOON FOR FOOLS (2013). He lives in East Sussex, where the book is set.
Talking Points
The inspiration for the novel – a cousin who died at the age of 40 for apparently no reason after two decades of a schizophrenia diagnosis, and the author’s own experiences of psychosis
The importance of humanising mental health conditions and the frustration at the usual depiction of people with severe mental health challenges as being violent etc
The weight of responsibility when writing fiction based on issues of mental health – and the challenges of writing about voice hearing as a non-voice-hearer
The research process - inside the Hearing Voices Network, meeting voice-hearers, visiting frightening psychiatric units, drug trials
The mental health system as a microcosm of society at large: materialism, individualism, surveillance, infantilization
NB Mental Health Awareness Week is 9-15 May 2022
‘The Octopus Man was a joy to read. I cried with laughter and I just plain cried. It is one of the wittiest and most humane pictures of a person and their mind - a timely conversation about mental health from within the perspective of the subject. It's a beautiful book and so incredibly funny.’ JOHNNY FLYNN
'A brave, bold and brilliant exploration of the forces that drive us mad and the wild, crazy journey's back to ourselves and each other. Scary, hilarious and touching. I loved it.' DR JACQUI DILLON
A letter from the author - Jasper Gibson, 2020
This book started with a knock at the window. I was sitting in a train about to leave London for Glasgow when my girlfriend tapped on the glass, her face fallen, her eyes brimming with tears. She had gone back onto the platform to answer the phone as the reception was so poor, and perhaps that was why they hadn’t been able to get through to my phone at all. The whistle blew. She motioned to me to take our luggage and get off the train. We weren’t going to Glasgow anymore. My cousin Ed had been found dead in his bed. There was no disease, no suicide, no murder. At the age of 40, he had simply stopped living.
Ed, once a handsome and brilliant law student (both my sisters were utterly in love with him), had suffered under a schizophrenia diagnosis and the effects of long-term medication for twenty years. His experiences became the inspiration for Tom Tuplow, the protagonist of The Octopus Man.
What does it feel like to hear voices? To see things no one else can see? To have beliefs which condemn you as mad? What is it like to be caught up in the British mental health system, at the mercy of a scientific consensus that fundamentally rejects your reality? What is it like to be on such heavy drugs that every day you wake up on the bottom of the sea?
I always knew this book had to be first person, present tense. Yet though we see the world through Tom’s eyes, I hope too that the thoughts and feelings of the other characters, particularly his long-suffering sister Tess, are just as real, just as valid.
This is not an anti-psychiatric or indeed political novel, in the sense that its primary concern is not ‘another world is possible’, but rather another possible world. However, if we book-lovers can argue that the novel is the most human of all the arts, and that the lodestone of this artform is the individual, then questions of human dignity are bound to rise when discussing mental health provision. Though for some, receiving the label 'schizophrenic' is a relief, a label the world can understand, for many it means a catastrophic loss of power over oneself and one's decisions.
Unlike so many portrayals of people with mental health difficulties as either psychopathic killers or 'Rainman'-type idiot savants, this novel hopes to bring a little more reality, and humanity, to those in touch with dimensions the rest of us cannot access. If just one reader doesn't move seats next time they see a person apparently talking to themselves on the bus, but instead wonders what happened to them, what have they suffered, what have they seen, then this book will have been worth it.
The other thing is that it's meant to be funny. I do hope you like it.
