Review: 'The Treatment' by Sarah Moorhead

Sometimes it happens that a blurb is so good, that a concept is so intriguing, that the expectations inevitably grow. Usually, when I'm the only one who is building hype, it doesn't affect my reading. Unfortunately, in the case of The Treatment, I had high expectations and they were not met. Thanks to Canelo and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 8/31/23
Publisher: Canelo

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

The future of law enforcement has arrived, courtesy of private health contractor Janus Justice. Their ground-breaking ‘Offender Treatment Programme’ has been hailed as the most effective way of tackling crime yet.

As offenders move through the four-tiered system, their needs are dealt with, each tier more drastic in its methods:

Tier One: Low-risk crimes. Physical therapy encouraged

Tier Two: Trauma and addiction. Emotional and psychological reasons for offending are examined

Tier Three: Aversion therapy & moral punishment

Tier Four: Siberia, where all hope is lost

But Grace Gunnarsson, one of Janus’ most highly regarded rehabilitation psychiatrists, has uncovered a terrible flaw in the system, one that is allowing people to get away with murder...

The Treatment has a fascinating premise with honourable ancestors in the Dystopia/Sci-Gi genre. The novel engages with questions of how justice can be meted out in an unfair society, where the line lies between justice and retaliation, and what the role of the public is in this. A clear predecessor to this novel is A Clockwork Orange, both in its premise and in  the violent excess of some of its characters. Another, for me, clear inspiration is that one, horrifying episode of Black Mirror, White Bear. That Black Mirror episode has haunted me ever since I first saw it because of how ruthlessly it makes you question your own morality and your own desire for revenge. By watching it it made me feel complicit, which is intense. That is what I was expecting from The Treatment as well. I was expecting to walk away from this book having been challenged in my ideas about society, justice, and psychology. That's not what I got. The premise of the novel continues to hold a lot of potential. The way in which Janus Justice has revamped the justice system is very interesting, providing assistance for low-level crimes while the government provides resources to alleviate poverty and misery. Offenders get treated in a holistic way meant to remove the causes behind the crime. This was a great set-up and I was intrigued to find out how Tier Three, where Aversion Therapy takes place, would complicate this. Unfortunately for me the story was more focused on Grace's relationships and thoughts on psychopathy than on the moral implications of what's going on. 

Grace has kept her past well-hidden. Neither her husband, Dan, nor her friend Shannon nor her employer, Janus Justice, know where she came from and that is how she wants it. Because this allows her to do the work she loves, helping offenders at Tier Two in the justice system, by providing them with therapy and resources so they can improve their lives for the better. When she gets drawn into Tier Three, however, her life is turned upside down. Justice is not being meted out as she expected, the system does not seem fair, and her past is suddenly breaking into her present. I don't really want to spoil anything and since the blurb makes 0 mention of Grace's backstory I feel like I would be no matter what I say. So let me just say that Grace's personal turmoil is what The Treatment is really about. The science, the ethics, the justice, it all felt like backstory to the personal drama. Around a third into the book I started to realise this and I had to battle forward from there till the last page. 

It's been a while since I really struggled with a book in the way I did with The Treatment. I have some ideas about why this happened. This paragraph contains some spoilers so skip if necessary. Firstly, I had high expectations based on a blurb that didn't fully reflect the novel. That's partly on me, partly on the publisher. Secondly, I did not enjoy the characterisations in the novel. Grace started of interesting, thanks to a fascinating Prologue, but it quickly went downhill for me when I felt like her justifications of her own behaviour were insincere and inconsistent. For a someone who is supposedly an incredibly psychiatrist, she is not very insightful, in my opinion. The characters around her also felt two-dimensional, from Shannon who only appears when she's needed, to Dan who feels like a plot device (we're not meant to like him, and I didn't, but even then I'd like some depth), to Remy, a childhood friend who is a repository of fond memories but never feels fully fleshed-out. Worst is a trio of characters who form something of a shadowy crime syndicate. We learn about them through Mal's perspective. While Mal is given a tragic backstory, this actually did nothing to make him sympathetic in my eyes. In fact, it did the opposite as I was not impressed by how he used another's tragedy to try and consider himself better than the other two. These two, Bizzy and Sarge, are absolute caricatures and felt so flat and underdeveloped to me that it actually ruined the book for me. With their arrival, all nuance fled from the book for me as it became a mix between thriller and action novel in which any potential debate about justice and morality evaporated. Instead there is just a lot of violence and threatening. My third and final explanation as to why I don't think this book worked for me is how much of it is just us being told about things rather than witnessing them. It's the "don't tell, show" thing, which I usually hate but here it's true. Remy and Grace's relationship is only shown to us in one flashback and for the rest we have to rely on Grace's word that they were close. Her obsession with psychopathy also comes up again and again and Moorhead consistently tries to explain to us how it works, and it just didn't work for me. Maybe I've read too many non-fiction books about it to fully appreciate it in fiction, but every time Grace would go on about psychopathy I deflated. We're told so much and yet none of it resonated for me.

While I have the above reasons as to why this book didn't work for me, I'm still a little baffled that it went so wrong. While some of it had to do with Sarah Moorhead's writing, this was only really an issue because I had such different expectations. Had I known, going in, that this was more of a thriller/crime book the writing probably wouldn't have been as much of an issue for me. (Although even then I'd have had some issues with the characterisation.) Perhaps I misread the blurb and maybe I just had weirdly high expectations, and this book will potentially work really well for other readers. I wanted more depth, I wanted to actually be challenged in my own perceptions, and instead I was challenged in how much violence and exposition I could stomach. 

I give this novel...

2 Universes.

I'm not quite sure how to end this review because it's been a while since I've had this reading experience. I've rated this 2 Universes because some of the novel's aspects do work. It just was not what I felt I was promised and as such I'm mainly disappointed.