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Chloe Leung reviews Alexendra Strnad’s provocative exploration of the quietudes and disquietudes of madness.  

Alexendra Strnad, The Wykehamist, (The Black Spring Press Group, 2025), 333 pp.

On 4 September 1913, Ernest Wagner, an esteemed schoolteacher, quietly slit the wrists of his wife and four children in Stugaart. In What is Madness (2012), Darian Leader calls attention to an oxymoronic mental state – “quiet madness”. In quiet madness, one falls ‘mad’ in unfamiliar ways. Instead of raging through the streets or attacking strangers, those who suffer from “quiet madness” might look and act just like you and me. But when their pressure reaches a tipping point, hell breaks loose. Alexendra Strnad’s Lucian Dorsey might be considered one of those quietly mad – until he reaches his tipping point, and brutally tortures and murders two women in his apartment in Hong Kong.  

The Wykehamist begins with a morbidly tantalising episode, in which Lucien Dorsey, an alluring Cambridge graduate, goes to a hardware store in Hong Kong to locate tools that allow him to sever a finger from a human body and to casually contemplate the feeling when flesh is no longer attached to bones. We are puzzled by his disorientation: why is he in Hong Kong? Why is he binge eating pizza while disinterestedly watching porn? Did he really murder someone? Why? But before we get any context about this bizarre opening, we are introduced to Clementine, a journalist studying a case related to Lucien. Soon after, the relationship between Lucien and Clementine crystalises: Clementine has been Lucien’s obsessive stalker since they were at Cambridge. After a fraught attempt at what we would now call a ‘situationship’, Clementine decided that she would take control of her life and move on, until she finds herself covering a serial murder case starring Lucien years later. The novel is a page turner. We wish to know why Lucien did what he did. We are desperate to understand Clementine’s unspeakable infatuation for Lucien. The ‘madness’ of the characters dovetails with the irresistible momentum of the plot. The reader flips through page after page as compulsively as Lucien mercilessly flicks his fingers at his victims one after another. 

But why ‘the Wykehamist’? Most of the novel recounts Lucien’s Cambridge days rather than his education at Winchester College, the origin of the Wykehamist label. We only get a short glimpse into Lucien’s early school days at Winchester, which is not directly named in the novel. Lucien’s reminiscence explains where his ambition and his singular sexual appetite came from. He was a bright young boy – perhaps too bright to be understood. At Winchester, he was educated to believe that he will get into Cambridge one day and is destined for success. Schooling itself, however, is but “a short blip”, otherwise known as “a minor inconvenience in what would be a successful life” (p.267). It is also at Winchester where he had his first foray into sex with a boy. Despite the unseemly night adventures in the boys’ lavatories and dark cupboards, Lucien is adamant that “he was not gay” (p.267). It seems that these are remembered to account for Lucien’s ‘madness’ in the form of murder and sexual assaults. The implications of the novel’s title now seem obvious: these elitist institutions, while undoubtedly nurturing bright young minds, seem also responsible for producing individuals who are capable of cold murder and rape. The insidiousness of the corruption is as subtle – yet startling – as the link Strnad made between Lucien’s identification as a Wykehamist and his torture murders. 

At some point, too, Lucian’s ‘madness’ is attributed to his perpetually intoxicated state. Most of his violent episodes occur under the effect of drugs and alcohol, which softens the line between sanity and insanity. To be sure, Lucien has to own up to his decision to take those intoxicants. But do the side effects also mean that Lucien should not be blamed for the crimes he committed, since they were performed under the influence – that he was not ‘himself’? Concurrently, we are also made aware that alcohol and drugs are what makes him feel like himself again, in which he is “full of energy and resolve, truly magnificent in a sick and venal world” (p.274). Are his hallucinations a result of the intoxicants he takes or are they signs of his ‘madness’? Strnad here proposes a vertiginous notion: symptoms of ‘madness’ are indistinguishable from side effects of intoxicants. But even when Lucien’s self-proclaimed power is a sign of his ‘madness’, these symptoms, as Freud argues, are responses to ‘madness’ rather than ‘madness’ itself. They are one’s idiosyncratic ritual of exorcising the demons that one lives with. 

Strnad’s novel also offers an unconventional perspective examining how feminsm and its tropes are all too easily subverted and transformed into something darker. Proud slogans like ‘female solidarity’ and ‘sisterhood’ are defamiliarised and put on trial. In the novel, female solidarity is exploited to reinforce a female rage that stemmed from the patriarchal system. When Clementine is trying to help Tiny, a woman from Jakarta who fishes for rich men at night clubs in Hong Kong, she imagines that she is doing her a favour by asking her to leave Lucian, while in fact she is motivated by jealousy. Interestingly, as she reflects upon her motive in helping Tiny, she is conscious of the lies that she is telling herself: “she even tried to convince herself that she just wanted to help a vulnerable young woman escape the clutches of a controlling man” (p.288). What’s more, she has to muster “all of her female sympathies” to do so while singing the slogan: “It’s only what women should do for one another” in a shared “sisterhood” (p.296). It seems to me that the novel is unmasking in this darker side to Clementine’s behaviour the potential for people to exploit a more broadly positive, or at least benign feminist discourse. Clementine’s repeated attempts at prying into the mind of Lucien blackly mirror the female narrator in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922). Woolf’s narrator, barred from Oxbridge and other elitist institutions, haunts the outside of the rooms and libraries while she strives to pry open Jacob’s and the minds of young men. In The Wykehamist, though  women are allowed to study at Oxbridge and feminism is part of the dominant discourse, Clementine remains an outsider. While Strnad is not necessarily launching an attack against feminism, the novel makes clear both that the same principles that have promoted women’s rights can easily be distorted to achieve selfish ends, and that feminism is not a panacea that opens the way to universal inclusivity. 

The Wykehamist closes with Clementine’s victorious claim that she has, perhaps, terrified the “psycho-murderer” ever since her harmless stalking back in Cambridge (p.335). She also entertains the idea that she might have “pushed him over the edge” and made him do what he did. The novel, then, seems to be as much about Clementine’s psychosis as it is about Lucian’s. Fortunately, unlike Lucien, who found no outlet for years of repression shaped by elite education save for murder and drug abuse, journalism provides a legitimate outlet for Clementine’s unruly passion for Lucien’s private life. Clementine’s devotion to her journalistic career can be read as her endeavour to bring order into the ‘madness’ (in her case, it is Lucien’s undecipherable singularity) that haunts her. 

Dr. Chloe Leung holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, specializing in Modernist Literature. Her thesis investigates how modernist works (Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Jean Rhys) deploy free indirect discourse to disentangle “illness” and “disability” from medical/scientific paradigms. Her latest article examines how un-speak-ability in Woolf moves away from an ableism that restricts sense-making intelligence. In addition to modernist studies, Dr. Leung is also interested in dance studies. She has examined how balletic movements contribute to Woolf’s representation of death in an article “A Rhapsody for Tuesday: Undercurrents in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and the Royal Ballet’s Woolf Works (2015)” (2022). Dr. Leung is currently an Assistant Professor at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.