Bodies: From the creator of Bodyguard and Line of Duty - Softcover

Mercurio, Jed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099422832 ISBN 13: 9780099422839

Publisher: Vintage, 2003

Synopsis

A darkly powerful and blackly funny exposé of the horrors of life as a junior doctor, from the BAFTA award-winning creator of Bodyguard and Line of Duty

‘Funny, readable, galling, painful and terrifying in all the right places’ Guardian

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider is allowed to see: a storm of malpractice, corruption, sex, drink and drop-dead exhaustion.

But for first day junior doctors, their initiation into this world – the ‘Killing Season’ – is about to begin.

A whistle-blowing despatch from the frontlines of hospital life, Jed Mercurio’s Bodies takes us on a nerve-jangling journey through one junior doctor’s loss of innocence, and his desperate, dangerous attempts to right his – and his colleagues’– wrongs.

About this title

Product Description:

Inside every hospital there exists a world no outsider has been allowed to see, not even those who arrive there to begin careers in medicine. Into this plunges an idealistic young doctor who is about to lose all innocence in a world that long ago lost its sense of right or wrong.

Review:

The unnamed narrator of Jed Mercurio's Bodiesis a newly qualified house officer in a busy city hospital. He arrives with his ideals intact and a vision of what his career in medicine will be. Within a short time the relentless procession of sick and damaged patients, the long, wearying hours he is obliged to work, the cynicism of his colleagues and the constant presence of death and disease take their toll. His idealism vanishes. He looks the other way when senior doctors are negligent or treat patients with contempt. He suffers guilt when a terrible mistake of his own is routinely covered up. His only escape is an intense sexual relationship with a student nurse. Sex is as clinically described in Bodiesas the indignities that age and accident inflict on the body. Mercurio wants to replace the melodrama of TV hospital series in which square-jawed doctors and glamorous nurses battle heroically against sickness and disease. In order to do so, he spares the reader few of the physical details that accompany illness and the body's disintegration. In pursuit of realism he peppers his text with medical slang and jargon, carefully annotated and explained in footnotes. What he has produced, however, is not realism but an inverted version of the melodrama. Instead of everything finally turning out well, the reader knows that, in this novel, everything will turn out very badly indeed. In place of square-jawed doctors saving the sick, Mercurio gives us drug-popping cynics exchanging the blackest of banter over dying patients. Melodrama it may be but, as the book's narrator seeks redemption by turning whistle-blower on hospital practices, it is very gripping melodrama.--Nick Rennison

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099422832
• ISBN 13: 9780099422839
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368