Bodies - Softcover

Mercurio, Jed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099472295 ISBN 13: 9780099472292

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Synopsis

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider has been allowed to see, not even the idealistic young man who has come to start a career in medicine. What awaits him is a life of institutionalised cynicism, pitch-black humour and visceral sex, and soon it changes him more terribly than he could ever have feared. Written by a former doctor, Bodies is a novel of almost unbearable power and intensity. It is also a moving portrait of the loss of innocence, the healing power of sexual love, and of a young man's quest for redemption in a world that's lost its sense of right and wrong. In Bodies, Jed Mercurio, the man behind the television series Cardiac Arrest, has produced an even more disturbingly authentic despatch from the frontline of hospital life.

About this title

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

Review:

'Deeply likeable and entertaining...funny, galling, painful and terrifying in all the right places...I couldn't put it down' Julie Myerson, The Guardian 'The malignant humour is relentless.' Daily Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0099472295
• ISBN 13: 9780099472292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368