The Ballroom
It is the long hot summer of 1911, and Dr Charles Fuller works as a First Medical Officer at the Sharston Lunatic Asylum in West Yorkshire – based upon the real West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, which only fully closed in 2003. Sharston is a huge institution with around two thousand inmates, set amongst the rolling dales. Charles is committed to developing his theory of therapy through music, but he is also an enthusiastic eugenicist, wanting to develop a better society through selective breeding of superior genes. The story is also narrated through two others – both inmates in the asylum; Ella Fay worked at the local wool mill, and one day, she angrily rebelled at the mind-numbing and dangerous work, and was promptly despatched to Sharston, where she was incarcerated. John Mulligan, an Irishman, intrigues Charles by his chronic melancholy and lack of response to stimulus, but he decides to make him a case study to demonstrate the benefits of music upon the mentally ill. As the story develops, Ella and John 
develop a mutual attraction during the weekly dancing between the two otherwise separated sexes, while problematical issues with Charles’ sexuality and then his own mental stability become apparent. The developing relationship between Ella and John takes place during the oppressive and constant heat of the summer, and it ends in profound consequences for all of the main characters.
It is a moving and poetically written book, gentle in its descriptions of harshness, beauty and intolerance. It is a revelation to see just how huge and self-contained the asylum was, as well as how little could be done to help those unfortunates inside and the degree of their general mistreatment – the more capable inmates worked in conditions approaching slavery or tied labour.
