In Heavy Light, Horatio Clare chronicles his ‘journey through madness’ and how he emerged from it
- Writer Horatio Clare writes lucidly, fluently and honestly about his mental health issues and the treatment he received for them
- He shines a light on attitudes to mental health in Britain, the US and beyond
Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing
by Horatio Clare
Chatto & Windus
Horatio Clare is by no means the first author to write about what it’s like to go barmy. Evelyn Waugh, propelled into a series of delusions by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, recorded his experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. More recently, Kingsley Amis – having reluctantly had to give up drink after breaking a leg – suffered multiple hallucinations, which provided material for the chapter A Peep Round the Twist in his 1991 memoirs.
Lucid, fluent, utterly unembarrassed and writing with the immediacy of a crash survivor, Clare takes the genre a step further in Heavy Light, which could also be titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Man. It’s a forensic, yet tender account of his plummet into insanity, treatment at the – frequently gentle – hands of the government health service, and eventual redemption.
More than this, he shines a light on attitudes to the mentally ill, not just in his native Britain but also in the US and other parts of the world, and suggests a simple solution. It’s a sad, uplifting, timely book – given the spike in mental health problems caused by Covid-19.
The cautionary tale starts in 2018, when Clare, his partner Rebecca and two children are bound for a skiing holiday in Italy. Overworked from writing, teaching and presenting radio programmes, and thrown off kilter by a surfeit of cannabis, Clare falls prey to his demons, imagining his family is being tracked by shadowy secret agents and diligently scouting the resort for concealed ordnance and potential snipers. But for the haunting reality, this could almost be an extended comic anecdote.
Back in Britain, matters take a turn for the worse until the point where Clare believes that he is simultaneously engaged to Kylie Minogue and involved in “a secret worldwide effort to bring about universal change, on pain of planetary destruction by aliens”. Finally, after being found cavorting naked on top of a Land Rover in the middle of the night, he is – to employ the standard euphemism – taken into care.