conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled The Treatment about Richard, Ford, Sometimes with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Richard Ford the author is a writer after my own heart and has been for years. His storytelling is useful in the old-fashioned sense. Sometimes it's wistful, even skeptical, but never despairing or even pessimistic. His ironies penetrate and are sharp but don't wound. As a writer he is clever and vigorous about what's funny and always searching for what balm humor can add to the human condition. In this way his novel serves as an elegant instruction kit for how we -- adults, after all -- may make a hopeful, credible peace with life. -- Review
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a plot for a book about Richard, Ford, Sometimes with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Treatment (novel): A husband and wife are discovered imprisoned in their own home near Brockwell Park in South London.\nIt is a hot summer and they are badly dehydrated, they've been bound and beaten, and the husband seems close to death.\nRory Peach, their 8-year-old son, is missing.\nDetective Inspector (DI) Jack Caffery is one of the police team.\nThe disappearance of the boy rekindles memories of his brother Ewan, who was abducted as a 9-year-old and never seen again.\nCaffery tries to find the boy at the same time as helping his girl friend cope with a sexual attack.\nHe follows clues that might allow him to find out Ewan's fate.\nPatterns of child sexual abuse start to emerge, and Caffery tracks down a young man who was abused in the same park many years earlier as a child.\nThe DI is convinced the attacker will be targeting another family.\nRory's body is discovered, with evidence of sexual attack, but the DNA from semen is found to be that of Rory's father Alek.\nThe case is turned on its head, and confusion is added when bite marks on the boy's shoulder do not match Alek's dental pattern.\nCaffery understands that Peach was forced to sodomise his son.\nAnother family with a young boy, 8-year-old Josh, has been imprisoned.\nCaffery slowly pieces together the clues to find out who they are.\nHe gets very close to discovering that his brother is still alive, having suffered brain damage at the hands of a child molester.\nHe was a member of a paedophile ring, who managed children for abuse by adults and made child pornography videos.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book. Start with the sentence 'The Treatment
  The tape rolled and the screen showed the scratching, the white flecks of magnetic interference'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Treatment
  The tape rolled and the screen showed the scratching, the white flecks of magnetic interference. Would you recognize him? Nothing at the beginning. He sat forward with the remote control and skipped forward through the tape. The screen continued to flicker. On it went, on and on, with no image until, with a sudden creak, the tape butted up against the rollers. He'd come to the end. There was nothing on this tape. He ripped it out of the machine and plugged in a second one, started it, fast-forwarded it. Again he got all the way to the end and found no image.
  But he'd piqued her interest. She was barefoot—wearing only a pair of his gray boxer shorts and a short-sleeved vest she padded into the room, trying to look over his shoulder. "What is it?"
  Right. OK. Don't overreact. He put the glasses down on the bedside table and sat at the foot of the bed. "Rebecca—look." He couldn't make the complex adjustment she wanted—not now. "I'm sorry."
  She pulled her hand out of his trousers, sat up and rolled the shorts down to her knees, kicked them off her feet, and turned on one knee. She placed her hands flat on the bed and bent over in front of him on the bed—her back to him, her hips jacked up in the air. He stared at her, disbelieving, not knowing what to say or do. There was something so primitive—so crude. He knew he didn't stand a chance. He stood, unbuttoned his trousers and dropped his shorts, kicked them aside and stood behind her. "Move down a bit." He dragged her hips toward him. She leaned forward to help, her chin touching the bed, reaching between her legs to guide him. "I won't last—"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Back in Norfolk he put the boy on the sofa, got a beer, put some music on and sat down in the armchair, wondering how he was going to dispose of him when he died, wondering if he could cut up a body without puking. Minutes turned to hours, the boy's face swelled monstrously, hours turned to days and he breathed on, a glittering string of saliva connecting him to the pillow. His right arm and leg drew up on themselves like bird's claws, but by the third day, when Carl put a hand on his shoulder and shook him, he sat bolt upright and vomited down his mustard-yellow T-shirt.
  It was a slow process, but gradually, miraculously, the paralysis in his face began to correct itself and the dribbling stopped. He still grimaced and jerked, his head zagging back and forward like a baby trying to get out of a high chair, and when, a month or so later, he got up and tried to walk, his right foot pointed down like a horse hoof, but somehow Carl found all that easy to overlook. New possibilities were opening up to him.
  The change in Carl's attitude didn't escape Tracey's attention. She was glad. He had stopped being surly and losing his temper every five minutes. One night she heard noises coming from the bathroom, noises that echoed around the dark house, animal screams and the thudding of a body being battered against the cast-iron bathtub. When she tiptoed upstairs she met Carl coming out of the bathroom, a grim look on his face. He was sweating, he didn't meet her eye, and she knew, without knowing how, that from now on the boy was going to be Carl's special friend.
  And she was right. When he got boozed on the weekends Carl would come down the stairs in a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, a cigarette between his teeth, down to the living room where she and the boy watched the TV on a Saturday. He never spoke, he didn't snap his fingers or beckon or anything, he'd just switch on the light so they'd both look up and he'd stand there until the boy got up and limped out of the room. Tracey would turn up the volume on the TV and smoke a bit faster on those nights, trying not to think about what was going on upstairs. For days after these episodes the boy would go off into long periods of noncommunication—he would sit in the corner rocking, a blanket over his head, a steady whinnying coming from his mouth.
  Tracey was pleased—at last it seemed that Steven had reached the end of his useful life. But then one day, by chance, Carl discovered that Steven had been doing the work of the Borstal boys. While they sat back with their plastic bottles of cider and watched, it was Steven who was lugging the piles of car windows etched with vehicle identification numbers into the trees to smash. It was Steven who was doing the work with the angle-grinder, removing chassis numbers or cutting panels out. It was Steven who was growing bigger and more muscular and skilled around the garage. He couldn't string a sentence together but he could weld a plate over a chassis number in seconds. A light seemed to come on in Carl's head. If Steven could do the Borstal boys' jobs, then "What the fuck am I doing wasting me gin and Silk Cuts?" Before long he had set him to work—he became a little grease monkey, filing and beating and grinding and "I don't even have to find him a mask for the resprays," Carl said. "He don't know any better. Absolutely pukka." Now any Borstal boy who couldn't help Carl in the bedroom was redundant, and the trailer stood empty for long periods of time.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I opened my mouth then, canted forward a little and released a howl directly into his mouth. It had been building in me all the time I'd been chasing him through the snow, and now I screamed, like a wounded animal. I lunged, twisting the little knife into him, through the khaki uniform, grinding through the lucky senninbari belt. He didn't make a sound. His face moved, his head jerked up so fast that his army cap fell off, and we both stumbled back a pace in surprise, staring down at what I'd done. Gouts of blood fell into the snow and the inside of his stomach folded out like creamy fruit through the rip in his uniform.
  He stared at it for a moment, as if puzzled. Then the pain reached him. He dropped his rifle and grabbed at his stomach, trying to push it back inside. 'Kuso!' he said. 'What have you done?'
  I staggered back, dropping the knife into the snow, groping blindly for a tree to lean against. The soldier turned away from me and lurched into the forest. One hand clutching his belly, the other still holding the camera, he went unsteadily, his head held up with a peculiar dignity, as if he was heading somewhere im­portant, as if a better, safer world lay somewhere out in the trees. I went after him, stumbling in the snow, my breath coming fast and hot. After about ten yards he tripped, almost lost his balance and cried out something: a woman's name in Japanese, his mother's maybe, or his wife's. He raised his arm and the move­ment must have loosened things inside because some dark and long part of him slithered out of the wound, dropping into the snow. He slipped in it and tried to regain his balance, but now he was very weak and he could only stagger, in a hazy circle, a long red cord trailing from him, as if this was a birth and not a death.
  He couldn't answer. He had lost all ability to reason: he was no longer aware of what was happening. He sank to his knees, his arms raised slightly, and rolled softly on to his side. I was next to him in a second. His lips were blue and there was blood coating his teeth. 'No,' he whispered, as I prised his gloved fingers from the camera. His eyes were already blind, but he could sense where I was. He groped for my face. 'Don't take it. If you take it who will tell the world?'
  Those words have stayed with me. They will be with me for the rest of my life. Who will tell? I stare for a long time at the sky above the house, at the black smoke drifting across the moon. Who will tell? The answer is, no one. No one will tell. It is all over. This will be the last entry in my journal. I will never write again. The rest of my story will stay on the film inside the camera, and what happened today will remain a secret.