{"id":4309,"date":"2013-07-01T11:45:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T11:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4309"},"modified":"2013-07-04T10:24:53","modified_gmt":"2013-07-04T10:24:53","slug":"goldblatts-descent-by-michael-honig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4309","title":{"rendered":"Goldblatt\u2019s Descent by Michael Honig"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Atlantic Books July 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

480pp, paperback, \u00a314.99 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare to come across a comic novel that is both funny and serious but Michael Honig\u2019s first novel, Goldblatt\u2019s Descent, <\/em>hits the mark with a satisfying thunk.\u00a0 When we first meet Dr Malcolm Goldblatt he has already descended quite a long way.\u00a0 In fact he knows that his current locum job represents not only the Last Chance Saloon, but a last chance saloon where the drinks are very hard to come by.\u00a0 He is puzzled as to why this should be, since he has an appropriate and comparatively unusual balance between his medical skills and empathy for his patients.<\/p>\n

The reader, however, is soon made aware that outside of a clinical setting he has the emotional IQ of an amoeba.\u00a0 He simply assumes that the other doctors on the team are all like him, and has no insight into their inadequacies, needs and above all their terror.\u00a0 We of course see all their difficulties, and very funny they are too, and even funnier is the team\u2019s failure to understand Malcolm Goldblatt, who they all find threatening in one way or another.<\/p>\n

The most terrified and inadequate doctor of all is Professor Andrea Small, the head of Malcolm\u2019s unit and leading specialist in Fuertler\u2019s Syndrome, a rare and virtually untreatable disease that almost never kills anyone.\u00a0 Honig exactly captures the disconnect between her external behaviours and her internal logic.\u00a0 To her, ricocheting from moment to panic-stricken moment, her actions make sense, whereas anyone observing her would diagnose insanity.\u00a0 She is a great comedy character.<\/p>\n

All of the doctors suffer from this disconnect to a greater or lesser extent and most of the comedy comes from Honig\u2019s crisp dissection of each one in ways that are reminiscent of Kingsley Amis at his best.\u00a0 However he also understand the basics of comedy, and knows how to make a simple joke work on the page, and also knows exactly how many simple jokes are enough (answer: not many).\u00a0 His prose also captures something of the flavour of Catch <\/em>22, which entirely suits the mad logic of the NHS, and Goldblatt\u2019s take on it.<\/p>\n

The least mad doctor, Dr Morris, is both the most competent and the least funny, but his important function is to show Goldblatt one possible future.\u00a0 He can stop fighting the system, learn to keep his mouth shut and get on with doctoring, or \u2013 and that\u2019s his problem.\u00a0 Or what?\u00a0 Unlike Yossarian in Catch 22<\/em>, forced to fight in a war that means nothing to him, Goldblatt does have choices.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that none of them are palatable to him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The cover blurb tells us that Honig trained as a doctor, and he sprinkles enough medical jargon through the book to make the background convincing.\u00a0 The patients occasionally have a genuine medical problem, and real procedures are carried out.\u00a0 Some die, but mostly they disappear, discharged or transferred, so that medical staff find themselves in a narrative to which they rarely hear the ending.\u00a0 This is true of the nurses as much as the doctors, but the nurses don\u2019t feature in this book.\u00a0 With his student nurse-shagging days behind him Goldblatt has become like all the other doctors, completely unable to comprehend what happens on Planet Nurse.<\/p>\n

Woven into the dominant medical\/NHS themes of the book there is a secondary theme of Central European Jewishness.\u00a0 It adds to the book\u2019s texture but seems to have little relevance.<\/p>\n

Although Malcolm Goldblatt appears at the start to have reached rock bottom, so that the only way is up, he inevitably discovers that the Last Chance Saloon has a cellar, and still murkier places beneath that.\u00a0 In the course of the book we learn if he is able to find his way back towards the light but one thing is clear, we are going to hear more of Dr Goldblatt.\u00a0 I only hope that wherever he ends up Professor Andrea Small is right there with him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/p>\n

The most terrified and inadequate doctor of all is Professor Andrea Small, the head of Malcolm\u2019s unit and leading specialist in Fuertler\u2019s Syndrome, a rare and virtually untreatable disease that almost never kills anyone. Honig exactly captures the disconnect between her external behaviours and her internal logic. To her, ricocheting from moment to panic-stricken moment, her actions make sense, whereas anyone observing her would diagnose insanity. She is a great comedy character […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4309"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4314,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions\/4314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}