Not so long ago there was little true understanding of mental health. Diagnosis & treatments for many conditions did not exist or at best were crude, sometimes barbaric.
Even today, there is still much controversy over defining what is normal and how to help those who fall outside that fluid definition.
The condition of autism is an example. Once clumsily talked about as a single personality disorder it is now classified as a range of conditions occupying something often referred to as the Autism Spectrum.
Infinite Dream is not about autism though its central character is said to be ‘mildly aspergic’ exhibiting difficulties in social interaction and the handling of emotional energy.
Jack Hallis’s unconventional brain allowed him to spot opportunities in the biotech field that others could not. A combination of this and good timing set him on a path to become one of the world’s richest men.
We learn that his relationships with women are somewhat transactional as he channels his biological urges into a linear process of stimulation, gratification and then disengagement. Emotion is seldom present.
Then he meets U.N. foreign aid fundraiser, Corrine Azzard. The attraction is conventional enough to start with and would have doubtless followed the same path had it not been for that fateful equation (see previous blog).
So why does Corrine suddenly become the centre of Jack’s universe?
It is love of a kind, no doubt. By conventional wisdom it is a confusion of ideas & biological attraction which take an enormous grip on his mental state.
Is he ‘sane’?
Is the quest he embarks on after Corrine's murder a product of this dislodged mind?
Or does he still see a truth that we cannot?
