Tower and Town, October 2019

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Nathan Filer

Nathan Filer is one of the most engaging, funny and compassionate storytellers I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. Three years ago, I interviewed him on the World of Words stage at Womad, where he enthralled the audience with tales about his life as a stand-up poet, mental health nurse and author. He was in good spirits – his debut novel, The Shock of the Fall, had recently won numerous prizes, including the Costa Book award. It had also been translated into 30 languages. But I also detected a certain anxiety. How do you follow such huge success? Second book/album/film is a curse that plagues many artists.

Three years later, Filer has come up with a brilliant second book, The Heartland. Wisely, it’s not a novel, thereby dodging comparisons with The Shock of the Fall, but a fascinating study of “so-called schizophrenia”, as he calls it. It’s also not such a big change of direction. As he explains at the beginning of the book, the protagonist of his debut novel, Matthew, had schizophrenia, even though it’s never explicitly stated.

The Heartland has only been out for a few weeks, but its critical reception has been extraordinary. “I have never read a more powerful book about mental health,” says Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. Jo Brand, the comedian and former psychiatric nurse, was equally impressed. “Absolutely blew me away… I cannot think of another book in the field that would come close to this.”

Filer takes us on a mesmerising journey around the psychiatric wards he once worked on, hoping to debunk myths and challenge assumptions about schizophrenia. He also invites us to spend time with experts and some remarkable people whose lives have been blighted by this most curious of human conditions. Erica, for example, is an ambitious fashion journalist in her twenties who is convinced that the contraceptive coil she has had fitted is, in fact, a camera implanted by MI5. Describing the transient nature of her delusion, she tells Filer it’s like “when you kind of sniff something in the air. Except it’s sniffing a thought”.

And then there’s James, who was struggling, mentally and physically, on the notorious Rowallan course in the 1980s at Sandhurst, attempting to become an officer. One morning he turns up on parade in the snow – wearing his pyjamas.

As Filer writes, “There’s a fragility to the mental health of everyone. It serves us all to be part of the conversation.”

Jon Stock