One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Wow, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a great novel!

It was a bit of a slow start for me (like most books are) but once I finally got past the first 50-70 pages, it was a rollercoaster ride. A very engaging and well-written novel that had me hanging until the end. I plan on re-watching the movie now as I wasn't much of a fan the first time I saw it. That played a large part as to why it took me so long to get into this book.

Ken Kesey is a great writer who explores many human characteristics in this novel. The setting is a mental asylum somewhere in Oregan, USA around the 60s or 70s. The protagonist, R.P. McMurphy, is a sane man that finds himself imprisoned in a mental hospital due to his many run-ins with the law. His larger-than-life personality weaves a path of destruction into the otherwise tame and routine-like world on the ward. The main villain, Nurse Ratched, is a character that draws similarities to the one Kathy Bates portrays in Stephen King’s ‘Misery’. McMurphy and Ratched are on a one-way collision course with a climatic ending that had me racing through the last hundred pages.

The novel is narrated by a big, half-Indian mental patient who puts a crazy (pun intended) spin to some of the stories told. At times I was left wondering what was real and what was just his imagination. The fact that he acts deaf and dumb allows him access to places the other patients are not allowed and gives an interesting insight into the workings of a mental asylum.

Kesey works his magic in making us feel the insanity and despair of the patients. He can be funny, in a laugh out loud kind of fashion. He can also be tragic, when you realize what the inmates go through each passing day. The novel is a definitive treatment of the age old abode of individual versus establishment and a must read. I give it 4.5 out 5 stars.