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Almost without exception, Patrick McGrath’s novels are about intense, violent affairs, their inherent melodrama underplayed by the author’s beautiful, clear prose which takes a detached (sometimes unhinged) analytical view of the subject, usually from a medical or psychiatric perspective. Like Asylum , which this latest novel perhaps most resembles, (not least of which is in its admirably concise and self-explanatory title), Trauma throws a lot of complicating psychological and behavioural complications into the mix - sibling rivalry, damaged people, Oedipal and Electra complexes and more Freudian analysis than you can wave a big stick at. It’s lucidly insane, which is as concise a description of McGrath’s work as I can find. Essentially then, there is no dramatic shift in subject matter or style for McGrath in Trauma , with a flawed or unreliable narrator (this one being a psychiatrist who obviously has a tendency to be over-analytical of other’s motives and behaviour), and clashes be...