Shuke, Rattle And Roll

A bout of depression, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, editing at the BMJ and stern words for critics are all in the mix as Carl Shuker releases a new novel.

- Diana Wichtel

In the sole, ringing endorsement on the back cover of Carl Shuker’s new novel, writer Pip Adam notes that it “feels more like a body than a book – life pumps and glugs and flexes inside its pages”.

A Mistake is the prosaic, triggering title of Shuker’s short, scalpel-sharp tale of misadventure, medical and moral, set in a version of Wellington Hospital. The body reading it may soon find itself pumping and flexing uneasily in unison. When a narrative is punctuated by short sections tracking the remorseless unfurling of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster – “T+2 min 08 sec. Nesbitt: ‘We have no downlink’” – it’s clear things aren’t going to go well.

“I’m halfway through and trying not to have an anxiety attack,” I email Shuker before we chat. “That’s a fantastic reaction,” he replies. “‘I want heart attacks, I want ambulances’, as Alexander McQueen used to say …” Later, he’ll say happily, of the work of Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, “You’re sort of stabbed in the side and then murmured gently to for the rest of the paragraph and you don’t realise you’re bleeding out till the end.”

Fair enough. Fashion designers and novelists need not heed the dictum “first do no harm”, unlike the medical staff at the hospital where Elizabeth Taylor is a star. At 42, she’s the youngest and sole female consultant general surgeon in a patriarchal institution. She stalks the hospital corridors like a boss, operates to thrash metal and calls nurses with inconveniently foreign names “Betty” or, on a bad day, “You silly c---”.