Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“A MISTAKE” by Carl Shuker (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

            It’s rare to come across a novel that succeeds in telling a compelling story in clear prose, with great intelligence and without patronising its readers. Carl Shuker’s A Mistake succeeds in all these ways.

I admired Shuker’s first novel The Method Actors, which was baroque by comparison with A Mistake, but which sounded deeply our reactions to, and understanding of, Japan. I wasn’t so taken by his second novel, The Lazy Boys, mainly because it dealt with a circle of people – deadbeat Kiwi university students – who are alien to me; but I wouldn’t deny the author’s skill in bringing his characters to life, or the authenticity of his tale. In their very different ways, both The Method Actors and The Lazy Boys employed many modernist and perhaps post-moderninst techniques in narration that would alienate some readers.

Is A Mistake Shuker’s deliberate move away from this style of writing?

The prose here is pared-back, straightforward (although much medical jargon necessarily comes into it) almost minimalist. The narrative is linear, without any elaborate flashbacks or flashforwards. The ideas are strictly focused and the novel is brief (fewer than 200 pages). Although not a medical man himself, Shuker draws on much knowledge of medicine, having been an editor for the British Medical Journal and having – as the acknowledgements note – drawn upon the advice of medical people.

Elizabeth Taylor (yes, some people make a joke of her name), in her early 40s, is the only woman consultant surgeon in Wellington hospital. With her registrar Richard McGrath, she performs surgery on a young woman, Lisa. In the course of the procedure, she finds severe sepsis around an IUCD (contraceptive device) in the young woman. Also in the procedure her registrar, at her instruction, inserts a surgical device, but in a way that severely damages the young woman. Elizabeth attempts to repair the damage. Post-operation, Lisa is transferred to intensive care, and dies.

So to the guilt and the recriminations. Did Lisa die because of Elizabeth’s faulty surgery? Or because of her registrar’s inept insertion of the surgical device? Or because of the pre-existing sepsis? Or because of the way she was looked after in the intensive care unit? If there was a “mistake”, whose mistake was it?

Synopsised in these terms, A Mistake could sound like the outline of a TV medical show – but it is no such thing. Through this situation, Shuker produces not only a detailed character in Elizabeth herself, but also vivid accounts of pressures upon the medical profession and the politicking that surrounds it. Elizabeth is aware that the Minister of Health is promoting “transparency” by making public reports on people who have died in surgery – in effect, publicly “ranking” surgeons. She and a colleague are trying to get published, in a prestigious British medical journal, an article about the negative effects of such a policy. They argue that it will increasingly make surgeons more risk-averse, and more likely to avoid poorer, less-healthy patients, and to take on only uncomplicated cases, to protect their reputations and career prospects. There are also, throughout the novel, many suggestions about the different conditions prevalent in private and public hospitals, and about the privileges of those surgeons who have come from private schools and who have parents in the medical profession.

Elizabeth is under many pressures. Early in the piece, we are told: “Elizabeth’s voice was cheery and pleasant. She had been up for 27 hours. This was the end of her on-call. She was so constipated she had not used the toilet in two days. It was useful for operating. She hadn’t drunk any liquids but coffee all day and her bowels burned and felt dry and heavy and wooden, reliable.” (p.11) Anybody who knows about the life of surgeons in public health will know about the long, tiring hours they have to work. Elizabeth also knows that to be a surgeon is to have to live with stress. When her registrar Richard seeks some words of consolation for the accusations he feels are levelled at him, she thinks: “How much mercy do you need? She thought what to say. How to let him hang from the hook and still function. How to learn to love the hook.” (p.31) “Loving the hook” must mean getting used to the inevitable stress. Elizabeth goes through the trauma of meeting the dead young woman’s parents, and has to face a “Morbidity and Mortality” session in which colleagues dissect her surgical abilites. Obviously this will have an impact on her career. In much of this, we are also aware that she is a woman in a male-dominated profession, sometimes patronised and often protecting herself with sarcastic wit.

Yet we are never nudged into seeing her either as a victim or as faultless. She operates while listening to thrash metal and while worrying about the article she is writing. Is this foolish distraction from the job on hand? She is often abrupt with people and comes close to being her own worst enemy when dealing with those who are assessing her case. Throughout the novel she makes snap judgements on people – often signalled by two or three lines physically summing up somebody to herself, and then thinking something negative. A whole lot of things are implied by this habit – her arrogance, but also her cocksureness. After all, you have to be not only skilled, but also self-confident, to plunge a surgical knife into somebody.

More generally, Shuker presents most of Elizabeth’s professional friends as hedonistic and smugly wealthy, like the hip bourgeois lawyer and his wife in Wellington, or the hard-partying surgeons in Auckland.

How or whether Elizabeth’s problems are resolved is for the reader to find out (I have synopsised little of the novel here). But I can note the range of images Shuker deploys to characterise her. Throughout her story, there are details of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, about which she thinks often – an apparently tiny thing that caused the death of a full compliment of astronauts. Surgical fatalities are also often the result of something tiny. Disreetly at first, but more clearly later on, we are told that Elizabeth is a lesbian whose relationships are precarious and so who is esentially a solitary person. She is childless by choice, with many implications that a woman wishing to get ahead in a highly-paid but very stressful career in surgery has to give up many things. There is also her determination to fix and restructure her house on her own – a situation which leads to another “mistake” late in the novel. The single-mindedness that allows one to become a surgeon is similar to the aggressive ability to pull a house apart and put it together again.

Like all good novels, however, A Mistake is not as neatly schematic as I might have made it seem in this notice. You are pulled along by the momentum of the story, by the sharp characterisation, by the social awareness and understanding of a whole profession; indeed by all the things that make it not only a good read but also a great brain-piece.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE METHOD ACTORS” by Carl Shuker (first published in 2005) and “THE LAZY BOYS” by Carl Shuker (first published in 2006)

I have just been considering Carl Shuker’s novel A Mistake, and I have seen an interview Shuker gave to the New Zealand Listener’s Diana Wichtel (NZL 9 March 2019) in which, very incidental to talking about his new novel and his writing career, he excoriates reviewers for the negative things they said about a novel written by a friend of his. Later Wichtel jocularly refers to Shuker as the “scourge of reviewers”. Okay, authors will always be in tension with reviewers – its part of the reality of publishing and reviewing. But just to make it clear that, as one of those pesky reviewers, I’ve taken Shuker seriously since his first novel appeared, I’ve decided to display here reviews I wrote of his first two novels.

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The following review of Carl Shuker’s The Method Actors appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 18 September 2005. Apparently to provide room for a large photograph of Japanese people in the street, parts of the review were cut. On the whole, this didn’t make much difference to its meaning. But the loss of the second-to-last paragraph changed considerably the impact of my review. I produce below the review as I wrote it, putting in bold and into square brackets those parts that the newspaper edited out. Two things I regret – that I didn’t try to explain the title The Method Actors, and that I didn’t say something about the part of the novel that,  for some reason, has lingered longest in my mind – the section in which an elderly Japanese finds ways of pretending that Japanese atrocities (in the 1930s) in China never happened.

So here’s the review:

 [Up on the northern side of the Pacific, the islands and people of] Japan will always be [something of] a challenge to most of us New Zealanders. We share the same ocean, we trade, [we gulp down much of the same media culture], and hordes of us each year play tourist in each other’s country. Maybe we think we actually know each other. Still, there’s this impenetrable gap between our cultures. Westerners can live in Japan for years, and still not get a fraction of the nuances of local life and customs.

It’s this sense of foreignness and alenation that is caught most startlingly in this accomplished debut novel.

Carl Shuker follows the lives and thoughts of a group of young gaijin (foreigners) and Japanese in modern Tokyo. [There is a linear plot of sorts.] Meredith, daughter of a dodgy New Zealand judge, is in search of her brilliant but erratic brother Michael. The novice historian Michael was in the midst of an investigation into Japanese war crimes when he went missing. As she searches, Meredith’s discovery of the Japanese past and present is counterpointed with viewpoints radically different from her own. They include Yasu, a young Japanese who cultivates hallucinogenic mushrooms for druggie tourist, the Frenchman Jacques and the Chinese-American Simon Chang, whose Chinese views on the Japanese are informed by a long history quite different from that of Westerners.

The novel’s blurb claims that it “leaps effortlessly from character to character”. [But] this isn’t quite true. [There are times when] the narrative voices sound too similar and its quite an effort to recall which narrator we are meant ot be following. Even so, the variety of personalities finally convinces.

[And, more than linear plot, there’s that ] pervasive sense of cultural dislocation. It’s signalled by a sort of running gag in which Shuker keeps cutting back to the inept essay a student is writing on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play in which a brother and sister are shipwrecked, like Meredith and Michael, in a strange foreign country.

Shuker paints an environment in which young Westerners (language teachers, exchange students, businesspeople) wander, blank-eyed and alien, through Japan’s neon-lit streets, looking for anything to hang on to. Divorced from their roots, they grab sex and drugs as meaningless diversion. Language is telescoped into a vaguely familiar international babble (mushrooms are always “shrooms”, air-conditioning “aircon”, Japanese women “J-girls” and so on.) [And pop-culture references are the international lingua franca.] Dialogue bristles with allusions to Hollywood movies, rock songs and cult TV series. But what they all mean to young Japanese is not necessarily the same as what they mean to alienated young New Zealanders.

This can be a difficult novel. I could have wished to lose some of the glibness of later chapters, where Meredith meets a Japanese sage, and he discusses in detail the bloody expulsions of Christians and Westerners from Japan three hundred years ago. This seems a way of rounding off and preaching about otherwise unresolved issues of Japanese historical violence. Occasionally, too, I found the 500 closely-printed pages a long haul. Yet in the end the fine and copious detail is part of Shuker’s conscious method.

[ Is this the best novel a New Zealander has ever written about Japan? I’m not enough of an expert in the field to make that call, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t. Is Shuker’s ultimate message the unknowability of a foreign culture – like E.M.Forster renouncing English knowability of India in A Passage to India? Perhaps. That such a comparison is worth making is an indication of the worth of The Method Actors.]

[This is a densely-written, ambitious, demanding novel.] If Carl Shuker goes on as he has begun, he has a formidable literary career ahead of him.

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The following review of Carl Shuker’s The Lazy Boys appeared in the Dominion-Post 28 October 2006. It is reproduced here unaltered from the way it appeared in the newspaper, though I can note that one sentence, in which I referred to a then-topical murder case, was edited out. Yes, I was less impressed by it than I was by The Method Actors, but that doesn’t mean I denied its authenticity. Shuker’s recent interview with Diana Wichtel suggests it has at least an element of autobiography.

So here’s the review:

Before you can really get into Carl Shuker’s second novel, there are a couple of awkward things that have to be negotiated. First, there are six pages of underpunctuated James Kelman-esque stream-of-consciousness drunken rave, the thoughts of a student far gone on the piss. Six pages is about the limit that this sort of thing can stand.

Then, not too many pages later, there is one of the longest, most explicit, detailed and painful descriptions of masturbation ever to appear in print. Not a few male readers, I suggest, will be crossing their legs and whimpering.

These terrors negotiated, you can more or less see where the novel is going.

The year is 1994. (It must be, because there are two or three references to the death of Kurt Cobain). Richard Sauer is an eighteen-year-old first-year student at Otago, rapidly going to pieces. He’s spent up large from his student loan and allowances, mainly on booze and drugs. His credit card is running out and he is unacquainted with lectures and course-work. He’s just been kicked out of a student hostel for drunk and disorderly behaviour and the proctor’s office is chasing him on a sexual harrassment charge after an incident at a party.

So he goes home for a while to Timaru, to cool off at Mum and Dad’s.

But it’s boring there. There’s nothing to connect with.

So he smokes and drinks and masturbates and beats up the family’s pet dog (literally) and nearly sets fire to the place.

Whereupon he returns to Dunedin, moves into a grotty student flat and the pattern continues as before. He smokes, drinks, masturbates etc. Only now he starts reading books about alienated serial killers who have carried out luridly sexual murders. And he sees how psychologically similar to him they are.

There’s a very strong theme of enforced macho posturing. Fairly early on you twig that Richard Sauer is a vulnerable, pathetic kid. He’s useless with girls. He blushes easily and lives with strong guilt feelings about his masturbation. He’s actually bored with drunken parties and loathes painting his face and going to the footie at Carisbrooke and pretending to enjoy it. But then it’s the pretend-macho thing to do – like burning books and couches in the street. And in the background there are high school memories of the utter terror boys felt at being called faggots.

The cover blurb compares the novel with A Clockwork Orange (no way) and Less Than Zero (maybe). At least the idea of self-destructive nihilism is there.

 But oddly enough I found myself comparing it with Camus’s L’Etranger because of a peculiar problem Shuker creates for himself. It’s that first-person (and in this case mainly present tense) narrative voice.

 Like Camus’s improbable hero, Richard Sauer tells his own story and there are times when he is just too articulate and self-aware about his condition. In other words, the author turns puppet-master and makes him a mouthpiece for his own thesis.

As a rubbing-your-face-in-it presentation of student grot, grunge and sleaze, this works. But though it shares a theme of role-playing, it is not the complex, imaginative thing Shuker’s stimulating Prize in Modern Letters-winning debut The Method Actors was. And I admit to finding very irritating Shuker’s habit of leaving out bits of conversations with rows of dots, thus “…..”