When we meet Frank, a white South African doctor, apartheid has ended. Frank inhabits a dilapidated hospital in a forgotten former homeland—”homelands” being sham black African nations that the apartheid regime drew up to sustain its fiction of separate-but-equal racial development. Now those homelands, and the mock ideals behind them, are gone. In Frank’s hospital, built on a grand scale to foster the illusion of significance, few patients come and little medical care is offered. The town and the region seem vacant and exhausted. So does Frank. He is used up, alienated from his family (his wife has left him for his best friend), and without noticeable hope or affection for his work or his country. He seems unprejudiced only because he does not like or trust a single soul on earth, black or white.
Then Laurence arrives, an idealistic young doctor just out of medical school. Laurence is “the good doctor,” determined to help the poorest and most neglected of people. Almost immediately Laurence runs smack into the lethargy and indifference that have taken over the hospital like a poison gas. It dismays and unmans him, but he refuses to bow to the inevitable—at least, to what Frank considers the inevitable.
Frank tells Laurence that he has made a mistake in choosing the hospital. “But people get injured, people get sick,” Laurence answers. “Don’t they need help?” Frank’s response is scornful:
“What do you think this place means to them? It’s where the army came from. It’s where their puppet dictator lived. They hate this place.”
“You mean politics,” he [Laurence] said. “But that’s all past now. It doesn’t matter any more.”
“The past has only just happened. It’s not past yet.”
“I don’t care about that. I’m a doctor.”
Thus Laurence embodies idealism and hope, but in a brittle, blind form. He has no human touch, no real empathy. His ideals are all in his head.
Frank, for his part, has made a temporary peace with the dead present. “The past and the future are dangerous countries; I had been living in no man’s land, between their borders, for the last seven years.” Though Laurence takes an unaccountable liking to him, Frank finds Laurence’s morality irritating. “So simple,” he thinks when they argue whether to report a black nurse for stealing:
One issue, all the complexities and contradictions reduced to a single moral needle-point. And that was Laurence. Something was either good or bad, clearly and definingly so, and you acted accordingly.
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” I said with sad satisfaction.
That “sad satisfaction” is precisely meant. Frank is satisfied with his sadness.
For his part, Laurence believes fervently in the “new country” where ideals and hope promise everything. Against all odds he launches traveling clinics, which raise everyone’s spirits and promise to rejuvenate the hospital’s mission. For a brief time, we think his dreams might come true.
Frank can’t stand Laurence’s idealism, and avoids his clinics. Laurence wants to know Frank’s “grand defining moment” when he decided to become a doctor. What Frank remembers is a moment in the army when he let himself be used to justify torture. He doesn’t want to know this about himself. He doesn’t want to think how depressed and hopeless he has become. Laurence and his ideals make it impossible for him to feel content in the same old place.
Part of him gropes for a meaningful life, a way into the future. A series of assignations with Maria, a black curio seller, teeters between prostitution and love. Sometimes Frank questions her, trying to learn about her life. Other times they barely touch while having sex, exchanging only money.
Frank and Maria live in worlds apart, separated by culture, language, wealth, and education. Frank knows that her real name is not Maria, but she will not tell him her African name. She greets his inquiries with an averted glance.
Despite this Maria becomes important to Frank. When he hears that she is pregnant (with his child?) and has asked Laurence for an abortion, Frank rushes to see her. He daydreams of running away with her and starting a new life.
“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s true. Everything is possible.’ And I saw that it was. I saw how simple such a huge change could be.”
But the dream fades away and he realizes its impossibility. “The future slid by me in the warm dark and was gone. The wrong feeling, the wrong time: everything was too late. All the power went out of me.” When he gets back to the hospital he sees Laurence sleeping, and briefly contemplates murder.
After long hesitation Laurence performs the abortion. It goes against all his ideals. When he angrily confronts Frank, Frank responds with his own anger.
“If you want to blame somebody,” I said, “blame yourself. We were all okay here. It was all going along fine. Then you came. And you couldn’t leave everything as it was. No, you had to make it better. You had to sort it out, improve life for everybody. Now see where we are.”
“Where are we?”
“Exactly where we were. Except that none of us feels okay any more.”
That says it. This short novel has plenty of action. Frank’s story moves ahead jumpily, from one ominous event to the next, like a certain kind of bad dream in which one is eternally hurrying but never getting anywhere. Military thugs, both black and white, threaten from the shadows. Loveless affairs and angry couplings develop and then break. The Good Doctor moves at an absorbing pace, but it is not a comfortable book to read, and it leaves no residue of moral clarity behind.
In the end the “good doctor” disappears and Frank becomes head of the hospital. He reports “a whole new sense of the future.” As far as we can see, however, nothing has changed in the least. Colonels and brigadiers still rule a lawless and destitute landscape. The hospital still provides little care and no hope. We have returned to the point at which the novel began. The disturbance of “the good doctor” has passed.
Damon Galgut is an original talent. He writes in a way reminiscent of his fellow South African J.M. Coetzee and more of the transplanted Pole Joseph Conrad. Dostoevsky or Graham Greene may even come to mind. Ultimately, though, Galgut is no more like them than one fevered dream is to another. In tense, hypnotic prose he probes the new South Africa and finds that it bears striking resemblance to the old South Africa. Cynicism, greed, brutality, and listlessness still dominate the scene. Ideals are slender, naïve, awkward. They cannot comprehend the darkness.
The “good doctor” calls to mind the Good Samaritan, even the Great Physician. Laurence is a Christ figure, but God makes no appearance in this book, nor does religion. As Frank sums up, “This was a story without a resolution—maybe even without a theme. I was only here to learn again how much I didn’t know and would never understand.”
That is, frankly, a terrible thing to say about Africa, where the abyss of chaos and destruction is so close. Galgut has written his own version of Heart of Darkness, shining a light into the shadows and discovering that his batteries are dead. Who could prove him wrong? By the evidence, Galgut has every right to his doubts. AIDS, crime, and corruption do seem the strongest forces.
Yet he is honest enough to show how love and hope still rise up and torment us. When Maria disappears after her abortion Frank feels “anguish … like the first feeling ever to touch me: its rawness, its power, was almost like love.” He works himself into a passion, thinking he is ready to give his life for Laurence, who is kidnapped. It turns out, though, that this passion is just a fantasy. “There was nothing to face up to in the end, except the ridiculous figure that was myself.” All idealism, even Laurence’s, gets swallowed up.
Perhaps it is churlish to complain when a novel this good is not as good as one could wish. Galgut has crafted a story of mysterious depths, compelling, edgy, and abrasive. A parable of the new South Africa, it gives voice to the ancient struggle between good and evil, between ideals and dead lethargy.
Nevertheless, the novel fails to reach the deepest parts of its story. It purports to bravely stare the truth in the face, but it does not tell why we have a story to tell. To do that, it would have to acknowledge the heart that aches as it looks at the beautiful land. (Strikingly, all the terrain in The Good Doctor seems dead, empty, and unloved, which simply cannot be in a country as beautiful and beloved as South Africa.) It would have to show that doctors like Laurence do not necessarily disappear but sometimes stay and muddle on. It would have to demonstrate why failure matters so greatly, as it surely does. Good as The Good Doctor is—and it is very good—it is not quite as good as it needs to be.
Tim Stafford is the author most recently of Never Mind the Joneses: Building Core Christian Values in a Way That Fits Your Family (InterVarsity).
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
