A review by batrock
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

1.5

 In 2024, The Silent Patient feels like a book that has escaped containment. It represents the tail end of the mid-10s thriller, and it has all of the elements that you’ve read before. A lot of what Michaelides does here still endures to this day, but there’s something about his approach that synthesises everything into the platonic ideal of the genre. But in a fundamentally dumb way, it must be understood. 

 

Alicia Berenson appears to have shot her husband in the face five times, and thereafter never spoke again. Theo Faber is a psychotherapist convinced that he can fix her, so he seeks employment at The Grove, the experimental facility that has custody of Alicia and is constantly on the verge of being shut down. 

 

The Silent Patient is primarily Theo’s narration, occasionally interspersed with entries from Alicia’s diary leading up to the night of the murder. Theo is your traditionally self-aggrandising male saviour protagonist who preaches dangerous myths about the psychology of sexual abuse (that second part isn’t quite so traditional); Alicia’s diary is the most standard “first person woman document read in hindsight” document that you’ll ever read, vacillating wildly between ultra mundanity and Michaelides revelling in “this directly contradicts the plot threads disclosed in the Theo sections”. If you’ve always wanted to read a diary in a novel that says “it would be really incriminating if anyone read this diary”, this is the book for you. 

 

Michaelides lives up to his surname by basing his novel around a particularly obscure Greek tragedy, and peppering the novel with various other references to the classics. That the titular character got the idea to be silent from an ancient play is possibly one of the least absurd elements of the book, and that’s saying something. The consistency of the description of the facility is such that it often feels like Michaelides self-published rather than going through the traditional blockbuster channels; it feels like it is never stated that The Grove is a single-gender facility, yet everyone interred appears to be a woman. Theo seems uniquely bad at his job, and the description of his home life is excruciating. You know that it all has to add up to something, but the narration reveals a cruel edge that suggests Michaelides isn’t as good at covering his traps as he would perhaps like you to believe; the hand shows. 

 

The audiobook is notable because Jack Hawkins does all of the accents that the story demands of him — dangerous with a character from the Caribbean, an Indian woman, and an old Greek doctor — and Louise Brealey … does not. Both of them bring a professionalism that the book doesn’t necessarily warrant, but it goes down easy on a commute. 

 

The Silent Patient is that cocktail of blockbuster sales with a complete disregard for credibility or respect for its audience. Breathlessly told in a fashion that hopes you won’t take long enough to process what your eyes or ears have taken in, The Silent Patient is big, dumb, and flashy. It’s enjoyable, but maybe not for any of the reasons you really want in a novel.