The Good Doctor
by Damon Galgut
Penguin
Written with Damon Galgut’s usual clarity and simplicity, this turns out to be a cleverly constructed study of commitment and betrayal, ethics and survival in what the blurb calls “a metaphysical thriller”.
The reader is asked, without any heavy belabouring of the issue, to examine the points at which critical ethical decisions are made.
A remote, rural hospital in an advanced state of underfunding and decay, and many hours’ drive from the nearest town, is the setting for this strangely absorbing novel.
It is narrated by the jaded and weary Frank Eloff, a doctor who describes the rest of the set-up: there is a skeleton staff (barely rendering a service) comprised of a black woman super-intendent doctor, a Cuban couple, an untrained and problematic male nurse, as well as a few cleaners.
Into this dispirited group comes Laurence Waters, fresh from medical school, to do his community service.
Not only does he not mind doing it, he is positively brimming over with enthusiasm. The first time Eloff sets eyes on him he thinks: “He won’t last.”
Despite the fact that the hospital is almost empty, Waters has to move into Eloff’s room, and the reader begins to wonder whether Waters is Eloff’s alter-ego. He is untidy, messy and a smoker, whereas Eloff is neat and self-punishingly abstemious.
Waters is eager to get to work, even to do day clinics in an attempt to reach those in need, whereas Eloff gets through the days doing the minimum. Eloff pussyfoots around the decisions and ego of the superintendent doctor, while Waters casually confronts and confounds her with his clear desire to be “the good doctor”. Even in their love lives Eloff and Waters are rather different. The former nurses bitter memories of a failed marriage and has a callous liaison with a local shack-dwelling woman, Maria, but Laurence has a girlfriend (admittedly absent) who shares his values and commitments — an African-American volunteer.
Eloff puts up with Waters’s naivety and friendliness amiably enough, but keeps him at a distance. He deliberately lets him know about his lover, Maria, even when Waters must take her on as one of his patients. Other binary balances include the male nurse, Tehogo, whose casual manipulation of the new dispensation offsets the faithfulness to the “struggle” of the Cuban couple.
And then there’s the brigadier, a somewhat mythical homeland puppet, thought to be masterminding violent crime in the area, and his white counterpart, a former security policeman now reduced to minding the border for the new government.
Into this bleak mêlée of mild anarchy and creeping corruption comes Waters, for whom “duty is a virtuous reflex”. First his questions and then his actions set in motion a chain of events with unsettling consequences.
This is an intriguing and satisfying novel, with an unusual take on the shifting landscape of post-liberation South Africa. In it, the studied cynicism of the Eloffs of this world is shown to be as great a stumbling block to change as corruption. Not that the ending provides any easy answers, but read it for yourself and see.