Fiction/Eileen Battersby: Frank is a doctor. Perhaps he's a good one but it is difficult to tell as he passes his working days in a deadbeat hospital where the emergency cases are immediately despatched elsewhere.
It appears to have been a long time since anything excited his interest. He has a girlfriend, or rather a sexual arrangement. Into his world of stalemate enters Laurence Waters, a young doctor with ideas to match a slightly odd personality.
As in his previous books, Damon Galgut, a South African writer who emerged as something of a literary boy wonder with A Sinless Season, published when he was 17 in 1982, writes in the style of Graham Greene. There is a slow, relentless intensity about his work. He has a feel for the guilt and self doubt that torment a character. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a novella and stories, and most impressively, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), followed. But then, he seemed to disappear into the world of theatre.
Far closer in style to another South African writer, Andre Brink, than he is to the great J.M.Coetzee, with whom he has been compared, Galgut is no impersonator but is most emphatically, a storyteller. There is a distance about his approach, his work is felt yet detached. There is a limited if egalitarian sympathy for all of his characters, he offers no judgment, he makes good use of the way lives drift according to new developments and changes in routine.
This dark, bleak book which follows the reawakening of a consciousness, that of the narrator's, is a fine, mature and understated performance from a writer who avoids the polemical yet still makes several subtle political points. Its appearance on the Booker short-list suggests that this year's judges did look beyond the obvious claims of engaging débuts such as DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little and Monica Ali's Brick Lane - either of which should win, yet Galgut is the dark horse.
This is a novel of substance, fear and regret. Galgut has opted for a point at which people no longer try to make a life - they merely want to hang on to what they have, as Frank remarks: "Nothing changed. That was the way of things up there. One day resembled another in the sameness of its intentions, the level graph of its ambitions; and I'd become used to it. I wanted to keep everything fixed and rooted in its place, forever." His apathy is absolute. Yet he remains more commentator than introspective penitent. This is how Galgut ensures we stay interested in him.
Frank does not enjoy Laurence's collapse, he is intrigued by it. Each piece of information gathered about Laurence is processed, such as his life-forming stint as a community worker in Sudan.
Once he has accepted that the new, young doctor must share his accommodation, Frank begins returning to life, his perception sharpens and he begins to watch. Laurence proves a zealot, sloppy about his living quarters but intent on saving the world. He speaks to Frank with a childlike candour approaching idiocy. Frank is drawn in, but never too close.
At times Frank's world-weary reading of both the young doctor and Laurence's black American girlfriend, Zanele, a born-again African, is unintentionally funny. "She and Laurence were the same kind of person; blindly and naively believing in their own power to change things. It was simple, this belief, and the simplicity was strong and foolish. I could see how they might have been drawn to each other, up at camp in Sudan - Laurence the young healer, earnest and passionate, she the lost seeker with her new name. And how South Africa, down at the bottom of the continent, with its glorious future just beginning, might have seemed like a backdrop to their belief."
Sufficiently old and cynical not to be seduced by Laurence's dreams of saving the world, he nevertheless acts on impulse in another area and some of the exchanges suggest that Galgut picked up some useful tips in the theatre. The description of a shabby but successful party arranged by Laurence for Zanele is well handled, while the aftermath is even better. In Laurence, Galgut has created the portrait of a non character who, unhappy with his personal history, invents another.
Yet, as the narrative unfolds, it is Frank in whom we are interested. He has arrived at a time of life where experiences become completely forgotten unless something drags them back. This is what has happened to his war experiences. A chance remark makes him think. "I remembered the voice. Cool, flat, soft. It was far more distinctive than his face, which was small and ordinary. His voice was memorable. I had heard it coming out of the radio and television, always level and void of feeling, no matter what it was saying. You remembered the even, dead tone, though you might not hear the words."
Events happen. Frank reacts, he begins to take a stand. He is no hero nor is he a villain, but then neither is Laurence either completely real or fake. Galgut can evoke the moment of realisation as well as he does the physical setting for each small drama. This is good old fashioned Graham Green-style exploration of apathy, guilt and bogus idealism. It is the stuff of good cinema and should ensure more readers discover yet another good South African writer.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Good Doctor By Damon Galgut Atlantic Books, 214pp, £10.99