A Short History of Nearly Everything

Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, The Good Doctor is a tale of personal conscience and its outcomes. The novel tells the story of two doctors and the rural hospital in which they work. The hospital is dilapidated and ghostly, with few patients passing through its doors, and is blighted by lack of funds and the indifference of its staff. Its location is bleak: the failed and forgotten capital of a South African homeland, one of the arid and fruitless areas in which the black nations were made to live during the apartheid years. The novel’s narrator, Frank Eloff, is a self centred and underachieving doctor whose lack of motivation in his work has left him trapped in a junior position. He is tormented by the memory of his broken marriage and his part in carrying out acts of torture during his army service, and he feels that his career is forever being compared with that of his celebrity doctor father. His oblivion is disturbed, however, when he is forced to share his room with a new doctor, Laurence Waters. Laurence is young, recently qualified, and filled with wide eyed idealism. Although a rural internship is compulsory under a new government scheme, Laurence chooses to be posted to this difficult area. He sees it as a way to effect real change, and, coming from humble beginnings, he strives to help the poor surrounding villages by setting up travelling clinics. However, when Laurence’s girlfriend, Zanele (another idealist desperate to save the world), arrives, the motives for Laurence’s good intentions are called into question. The Good Doctor may be set in South Africa, but it addresses issues common to medicine everywhere—the notion of personal gain and the motivation behind morality. Can the desire to help the world be truly altruistic? The only failing of this novel is that the hospital’s immediate past, before Laurence’s arrival, is somewhat unrealistic. It seems slightly unbelievable that no one before Laurence had attempted to change things or indeed been anything other than indifferent towards the hospital’s shortcomings. Despite this, author Damon Galgut has created something fresh and strong in this novel. It is a superb read, with a powerful sense of dark intrigue.