Book of the Week: The superb Mr Shuker

Even in local literary households, Carl Shuker may not exactly be a household name in the way that, say, Eleanor Catton is, or Catherine Chidgey has lately become. But there’s a good chance he soon will be, on the strength of the release of the film adaptation of one of his novels, and the providentially well-timed publication of his latest.
The emergence of his latest novel The Royal Free brings his tally to six since his first, The Method Actors, was published in 2005, smiled upon at the time by the judges of the Prize in Modern Letters. This was some book, and quite some debut. You can imagine everyone at the Institute of Modern Letters who was set to read out their work to the group after Carl would have looked very pale when it came to their turn. It is said comparisons are odious, but so are reviewers, so here goes: if you can picture a blend of Alex Garland (Feckless Western Expats Grapple with Indifferent Asia), J G Ballard (dystopia) and Thomas Pynchon (hypnotic writing, at once beguiling and bewildering, tortuous, elusive, polymathic, funny, poignant, occasionally over-self-indulgent and irritating as hell), then you’ll have an idea of what to expect. A Kiwi mycologist (fungi/fun guy — a pun to which, to his credit, Shuker never stoops) with a side interest in the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria before World War II has gone missing in Tokyo. His sister arrives to try to locate him. Meanwhile, his various friends and associates suffer slow-motion existential crises in a city that Shuker plainly loves. It’s all blended together in a psylocibin-laced mélange (magic mushrooms being legal in Tokyo — at a guess, almost certainly part of the attraction for the author). A word that was thrown around a lot in reviews was ‘postmodern’, which is academic code for ‘what TF did that mean’, but it made valid points about historiography as just another genre of fiction, and landed many of the gymnastic feats that it attempted (degree of difficulty: 9 and upwards) of blurring identities and sense of time. It’s a book that’s about as impossible not to admire as it is to love.
The Method Actors was followed in 2006 by The Lazy Boys, the first of Shuker’s novels to cross my radar and actually written before TMA. It struck me at the time (ever odious) as Scarfies reimagined by Bret Easton Ellis. It was essentially adolescence meets alienation over a keg in a dank, freezing, overcrowded Dunedin flat where they bond with inexorably tragic results. Richy is at Otago because he has nowhere better to be. He medicates his awkward, virginal masculine insecurity with beer, lots of beer, but results vary. It’s a wonderful, important but disturbing novel — its importance arising from how disturbing it is, or ought to be — and it surely spent a lot of time in the legal department at VUP as they wondered whether former All Black Marc Ellis would take issue with his cameo and sue (I’d love to know why he didn’t).  If I were asked to name my picks for top New Zealand novels, The Lazy Boys would be right up there.
I haven’t read Three Novellas for a Novel (2011). Anti Lebanon emerged in 2013, and here, think Ronán Bennett with a dash of, er, Anne Rice. It’s an interesting book to read against the backdrop of our present, fraught geopolitical times. One of Shuker’s great strengths is to evoke place, and he brings Beirut to life so vividly that you can practically smell the water pooling in the scorched and shattered concrete, and feel the grit in your eyes and mouth. It’s set around 2007 when Lebanon was being torn apart by civil warriors — its population split along ethnic, national, religious and sectarian lines, all themselves proxies for regional and global ambitions. The place is such a palimpset of misery that it was something of a shock to have layers of recent history stripped back and to hear some not-that-old, yet all-but-forgotten names: the Druze militias — remember those guys? And Yasser Arafat? It was also something of a shock when I realised that it had been darkly hinted that the principal protagonist might be… a vampire! I had to read the passage several times before I realised that a vampire reference I had blithely skipped past was less metaphorical than — or not so solely metaphorical as — I had supposed.
“Oh, come on,” I possibly muttered. “Surely the poor old Lebanese have shed enough blood without having someone suck it as well?”
Diamonds feature in the story, and I couldn’t help but think of this novel as a beautifully cut gem with a big, bat-shaped flaw in it. I could see how the name of the mountain range demarking Syria from Lebanon — the Anti Lebanon mountains — would seem pregnant with occult underbelly, obverse underworld possibilities to someone with Shuker’s quivering novelistic antennae. But please, no fangs.
A Mistake was published in 2019, and if it needed a comparative literary landscape, you’d probably put it squarely in Ian McEwan country: opens with an event, follows with the remorseless outwards ripple of consequence. A confident, female surgeon at the top of her game makes an error whilst operating on a young woman with an acute abdominal infection — or at least, one of her team does. They lose the patient. Cue the witch-hunt, the search for a simple explanation, an easy target for blame. The action is juxtaposed with an account of the disaster that overtook the US space shuttle programme, with the spectacular loss of the Challenger in 1986, a poster-child for the ‘systems failure’ species of disaster, the cascading ‘for want of a nail, the shoe was lost’ kind of clusterfuck that we see happening all around us, all the time. It’s a highly disciplined novel (apart from the slightly heavy-handed inclusion of the space shuttle material), showing mastery of characterisation, plot and sense of place (Wellington, in this instance, with a few glimpses of Queenstown). The movie, by up-and-coming Kiwi director Christine Jeffs, is in cinemas now, as they say. Perhaps it will distract from the grisly spectacle of the decades-long underfunding of our health system reaching its nadir, but I shouldn’t think so. The film ought to throw the spotlight on the novel, and if there is any justice, the novelist, because he deserves it.
Did I mention the timing of the release of The Royal Free is providential? If A Mistake: the Movie shepherds a new readership in Carl Shuker’s direction, then they will likely fall on his latest offering with glad cries.  It’s a range of things: a workplace comedy and a thriller with a dash of dystopia and a grain or two of magic realism tossed in there. Fans of Mick Herron (Slow Horses) will love it; anyone who feels sanguine about the prospects of civil society in the latter days of late-stage capitalism will find it deeply unsettling.
Shuker has a lot of fun with names. The principal character of A Mistake was named Elizabeth Taylor, possibly (as pointed out in a review by Kiran Dass) an homage to the acting icon’s cameo appearance in J G Ballard’s dystopian classic Crash. The main character in The Royal Free is James Ballard. I mention this in passing. One of his bosses is Doctor Death. James is a drone — a technical editor — in the offices of the third-oldest medical journal in the world, the Royal London Journal of Medicine, rival to the more prestigious British Medical Journal. His present task is updating the journal’s style guide. He’s also a solo dad: we infer the death of his six-month-old daughter’s mother from her absence. He lives in a ‘maisonette’ in a housing estate in a decaying part of Camden, loomed over by an NHS-run hospital, The Royal Free. There is social unrest — rioting and looting — across London, and one evening, as he nears the end of a jog, James narrowly escapes being mugged in a woodland park. A few days later, he is carrying little Fiona in a frontpack away from his home when he recognises the would-be muggers, loitering in his path.  A confrontation is inevitable, and when it comes, he does “a stupid thing.” The thugs live locally, they know where he lives. It seems improbable that they will not retaliate.
This is the narrative engine of The Royal Free. You probably don’t have to be a parent to be tugged along by that gnawing, corrosive fear for the welfare of your child, but it certainly helps. There are subplots: office politics, the disintegration of the social order occurring right outside their office windows. One of the regular features that the RLMJ runs is “A Patient’s Story”, where they allow the sufferer of some medical affliction to tell, in unadorned prose, their story. One of these is the tale of a 21-year-old Nigerian woman who develops vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistulas (Google those, o ye strong of stomach) in the course of a difficult birth. There are whole communities of women in Nigeria who suffer these injuries, and live as outcasts. She is fortunate, as there is a hospital near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo where the staff are experienced in performing the necessary repairs because they deal with so many refugees suffering from equivalent injuries through being raped by soldiers. “It’s a vile world we live in,” one of the chief editors observes, as the team debates the niceties of the language in which these horrors are described.
It’s a vile world indeed. There is another passage — pure Easton Ellis — where a colleague of Ballard’s, formerly a distinguished Syrian doctor, goes shopping for new clothes in one of London’s most exclusive boutiques, to bolster himself as he prepares to put the finishing touches on a stinging, potentially career-ending critique of the Turkish medical establishment and as a prelude to another, even more desperate act. The exquisite fabrics, cut and hang of the clothes are described in loving detail alongside Ibrahim’s flashbacks to a video he has just watched of the rape, torture and murder of his daughters by Syrian troops, after he had left them supposedly safe with his sister-in-law when he fled the country over two years before.
The structure — vignettes strung like pearls along the central plot (James v hoodrats) — works, for the most part. The funny passages are hilarious: his previous novels have been shot through with dark humour, but here it is given full rein. He excels in description, describing places, people. For example: “Dr Claudia ‘the Goddess’ Godwit, MD, FRCP, PhD, … is somehow impish and authoritative at once. Technically in her mid-50s, she is yet ageless and nearly six foot two and super, super famous across a certain stratum of the professional medical world. James discovered the term ‘tonsorial disarray’ in an op-ed piece and it captured something of her hair, the important grey and bushy brilliance of her hair. The Goddess’s hair had something of the unselfconscious virtues of alpine plants: an imperviousness, a hunkered-downness. As if it had a job to do — her hair had its mind on higher matters.”
There are short, pithy descriptions: “trouser-chilling mortgages” are instantly recognisable; the part of London in which he lives is “increasingly stab-happy.” There are long, febrile descriptions: “‘”…their Kate Moss-designed TopShop joint T-shirt and halter-top range for nipple cancer campaigns and their applied self-righteousness, their tacked-on anxiety-puncturing misdirected middle-class do-goodery fests.” The prose is wonderful. Few writers have such a feel for the rhythm of a sentence, with alliteration and repetition and rhyme all given their head. Get the sticky mouth-feel of a sentence like: “They ate the last of the least-liked chocolates from the last tin of Easter Quality Street that everyone was sick of (the clammy pink cream of Strawberry Delight, with its melancholy rumour of menthol).” And whereas The Method Actors would employ single sentences that ran (à la Pynchon) to many hundreds of words, occupying whole paragraphs, entire pages, the longer sentences here are controlled, disciplined.
While you might criticise the meandering point of view (although you’d call James Ballard the ‘main character’, we see the world from several characters’ perspectives, even the baby’s), The Royal Free exhibits Shuker’s trademark economy of explanation, fully engaging the reader in joining the dots. As in his other novels, he uses an ellipsis inside quotation marks ‘…’ to signify non-verbal communication, inviting you to supply whatever tic or quirk of expression you feel suits the context. In the same way, he shows you what characters do rather than tell you what they are feeling and thinking: you get to make educated guesses as to what motives, insecurities, psychoses etcetera are behind their actions. I like this feature of his writing a lot.
There is the suspicion that this novel has been cellaring for a long time: Shuker worked on the British Medical Journal for many years, and in the acknowlegements, he makes mention of someone who has ‘”stuck with [him] and this book forever.” Perhaps (speculation is probably more odious even than comparison) the bones of it have been lying awaiting just such an occasion as this, where it might be reanimated and released into a market craving a Shuker-rush. That would account for the slightly tossed-together feel that the novel has — and for the slightly bolted-on quality of the ‘magical realist’ element alluded to earlier. A couple of extraordinary things happen in baby Fiona’s locked room, and both James and the reader are at a loss to explain them. Shuker uses a clever technique to show what James’s own thoughts are: his browser search history, listed like found poetry. But these are quibbles, really. This is a tremendously enjoyable comic novel that packs a powerful punch — the genuine unease the main plot evokes, the bald juxtaposition of ‘civilisation’ with the vile that coexists in our world, the vertiginous ending —  and I hope it goes very well for him.
The Royal Free by Carl Shuker (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.