Book review: Two things can definitely be said about Carl Shuker. He never writes the same sort of novel twice and he never dwells on the same themes. Each of his novels is a new exploration of particular ideas. His debut novel in 2005, The Method Actors, dealt with New Zealand visitors trying to come to grips with the mores of Japan. The Lazy Boys examined the nihilistic and destructive nature of too many young Kiwi blokes. There followed a collection of horror stories and Anti Lebanon, a thriller but also a vampire tale. Then in 2019 came A Mistake, a taut, brief tale about the fallibility of even the best surgeons that’s since been made into a well-regarded film. The Royal Free naturally delves into very different territory, although medicine comes into it.
If you read only the first 20 pages of The Royal Free, you might think you are in for an erudite polite comedy. James Ballard, a New Zealander in his 30s, is a copy editor at the Royal London Journal of Medicine. His job is to amend errors in punctuation, weed out lame prose, find the appropriate technical words for medical procedures and sometimes check facts. He has to go much further than reviewing style manuals or separating disinterested from uninterested. Some of his colleagues in the Bloomsbury office are facetious wits, always ready to come up with puns based on classic works, making up pastiche poetry or devising cutting innuendo as per undergraduates from Cambridge.
All very jolly … but it isn’t.
First, there’s Ballard’s wretched life. His wife has died, leaving him to look after their baby, Fiona, who is not yet a toddler. He does his best to look after the baby, but when he’s away from his flat he has a young babysitter. He also regularly pays the babysitter for sex.
Then, there are threats that face him. Shuker does not in any way glamorise London. Quite the opposite. His London is a dangerous place, with arson and riots often threatening, with sleaze and decay encroaching on what were once acceptable middle-class areas, and with teenaged thugs who have nothing better to do than intimidate people passing in the street. Ballard falls foul of one such gang, leading to horrible consequences that run through the novel. Riots become more and more intense.
Further upsetting him, Ballard has a constant fear about his employment. In every publisher’s office there is some backstabbing, jockeying for status and fear of redundancy, especially when this journal is on the brink of going online and dropping the print version.
It’s hard to believe that Shuker is not recalling – and in a way satirising – some of what it was like when he himself was for several years an editor at the revered British Medical Journal.
His fictitious Royal London Journal of Medicine has all the perils of pomposity that can infect upmarket journals. In fact, Shuker sometimes suggests that the most educated of the publishing team may be able to produce golden words but they are not necessarily the best people to deal with harsh reality.
Shuker does not create a linear narrative. His style is more like bricolage, one tile after another. The travails of Ballard disappear for a while mid-story through the introduction of new characters. One is the Syrian Ibrahim al-Rayess, a medical doctor and trauma surgeon who has fled the chaos of the Middle East and is now on the journal’s team. Travelling through London, Ibrahim has a long, strange fugue in which he considers the quality of business suits and shoes, presumably attempting to blend in as a British professional.
There are some eccentricities in the narrative’s presentation. James’s baby directly addresses us for three pages. There are pages of fragmented dialogue or examples of correct publishing terms. Yet it all coalesces.
The medical journal, the newly arrived doctor who hopes for a better home in England, the violence on the streets and the casualties that have to be mended – all come together in the novel’s title. The Royal Free is the name of London’s public ambulances, lumbering through the city and trying to help Britain’s faltering National Health Service.
Stylistically, this is not always the easiest novel to read. But the many overlapping issues that Shuker raises are compelling. His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.
The Royal Free, by Carl Shuker (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38).
