Let’s take a step back in time, about four decades ago…I was sitting at a bar in a famous Los Angeles restaurant talking to a businessman from Australia. At first we were talking about the close American/ Australian relationship over the last fifty years. We then switched to literature, and I told him I had just finished reading a novel by Banjo Peterson.

He looked at me as though I was an alien from Mars and finally remarked, “You are the first American in the twenty years I have been visiting this country who has ever mentioned an Australian writer to me, nevertheless Banjo Peterson.”

I replied, “I’ve just been fortunate enough to be around literary people who study authors from around the world.”

Let’s take a step back, 7 years from that moment…At seventeen years old I become fascinated with the theories and works of Sigmund Freud. So obsessed, that after reading all his published works, I start making daily visits to the famous, “New York Public Library,” and start going through files on Freud that very few people have ever seen.

Standing on the platform at the 57th Street train station, waiting for the train to take me back to my home in the Bronx, I see the same gentleman night after night talking to visions and images that only he sees. His eyes express a horror that one would expect to see only in the eyes of veterans who have fought and suffered the consequences of war.

The gentleman is apparently suffering from schizophrenia and I try to explain his illness to myself using Freud’s theories and I cannot come up with any concrete or definitive explanations.

Move ahead two years, once a week I visit a mental facility on Long Island, with a group of other students at Stony Brook University. For four weeks, I sit with the same group of patients, who considering everything, seem perfectly normal to me.

On the fifth week I am taken to a different section of the facility, and the same patients I had visited for four weeks, who in many ways I had bonded with, don’t recognize me. Like the gentleman on the train station, they are talking to images and people that only they see, with their eyes rolling frantically around and their arms moving erratically as though trying to fight off evil spirits.

The sixth week is no different…the seventh week I am told I am not allow to visit with them. I am giving no explanation.

If you are wondering what all my rambling has to do with the novel, “The Consequence of Anna,” it has everything and much more to do with this amazing, mesmerizing, brilliantly written novel.

The novel takes place in the Australian Outback right after the end of World War 1. The Irish servicemen who were serving in Australia at the time the war ends are discharged from the military and have the option to go back to Ireland, England, or to stay in Australia.

James, a rising pianist with the potential to become world famous, is tricked into staying in Australia when Anna, who inherits her family’s sheep station called Sugar Alexandria, tricks him into believing she is pregnant after a drunken one night stand.

James, an Irish Catholic, takes responsibility for his actions and marries Anna and instead of going back to Ireland to pursue his dream of becoming a pianist, takes over Anna’s sheep station business and makes it extremely successful, even as the on coming world depression hits Australia.

Anna, ten years later, finally becomes pregnant and has twin girls as James’ dream of becoming a pianist fades, and he is left to playing his loved music in the bar he frequents with his friends.

With the influx of Europeans moving to Australia, the Aboriginals who have been there for centuries, are pushed aside like the American Indians, and the Mexicans after having to relinquish Texas and California to the American government.

The European businessmen pay the Aboriginals, who now work for them, less than half of what they would have had to pay fellow Europeans. James is one of the only owners who pays the Aboriginals the right amount and he is extremely liked by his employees.

Anna, who spent her youth with her cousin Lottie from England, during the summer months for many years before Lottie moved back to England to get married, is startlingly beautiful but she has a disability and often has to walk with a cane because one of her legs is missing some of its bones.

During their youth they played imaginary games and had secret hiding places. Anna would talk to imagery people and Lottie simply followed along for the fun. After all, it was just harmless games they were playing.

After being away in England for over ten years, Lottie moves back to Australia when her husband dies. Anna is overjoyed that her best friend and cousin is moving back and insists she lives with them and has James turn one of their three windmills into a palace for her cousin.

Her cousin moves in and is surprised to find that Anna is still playing these games from their youth, except that the imaginary people she is talking to are her dead mother and sister and a deadly gray wolf who pretends to be her friend and implores her to do nasty deeds.

Anna, forever wanting to please Lottie, gets her husband involved in a crazy scheme to help Lottie. The consequences are devastating.

I have never read a novel that so brilliantly and powerfully explores the mind of someone suffering from schizophrenia, and who also suffers from paranoia and autism which are usual by-products of a schizophrenia’s mind. Against the background of the Australian Outback and its prejudices and exploration of the Aboriginals and the powerful influence of Catholicism over so much of the population, this novel is a work literature and belongs alongside the works of Toni Morrison, the Bronte sisters, Conrad, and Hemingway.

In closing the two things that Freud got right were: one, that Da Vinci was the greatest left handed genius and two, that one day many mental illnesses would come down to the misfiring of neurons in the brain.