One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Write what you know. Kesey took that old adage to heart for his debut novel. Before being made famous for medicinal self-administration by Tom Wolfe with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey was supplied under clinical conditions, taking part in early 60s Government LSD tests. Prime positioning for understanding the narcotic filter through which central character Chief Brodum views the world – largely mute in the famous film adaptation but lending his secret narration to the book from page one. Onto this stage walks Randall P. McMurphy, the red haired veteran bar brawler – escaping the jailhouse into the petit bureaucracy and grand tyranny of the asylum. Here he battles for the humanity of a rag-tag collection of mollified inmates, perhaps more specifically pitting his own masculinity against ‘the ball-cutter’ Nurse Ratched. Kesey’s opening prose – performance-enhanced on peyote, they say – takes a psychedelic edge, yet insanity is occasionally argued as a higher sanity and there is much truth in the Chief's visions.

There is also truth in the 14 original illustrations from artist David Hughes, spaced throughout the text in this special Folio Society reissue. They view the world through the fractured lens of the insane. Wonderfully childish, cartoonish images stuffed with both madness and meaning which, alongside an excellent, insightful introduction provide new depth to this stone cold classic, finely packaged for the literary connoisseur in hardback cloth cover and case.

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is out now, published by The Folio Society, RRP £34.95