Carl Shuker

This is my 3rd of 4 books shortlisted for the New Zealand Ockham Book Awards.
I must say I would not be drawn to the cover, despite its relevance, to the contents therein. So far all three have had some traumatic content.
The main protagonist in this story is forty something Liz Taylor, a consultant general surgeon, at Wellington Hospital. At the end of a twenty seven hour shift she is performing urgent surgery with her team on a young woman in acute distress. A mistake is made and the young woman dies in ICU some hours later. Liz suffers the censure and blame from both the young woman's family and the predominantly male counter-parts at the hospital.
As well as this there is a proposal in the pipeline for surgeons outcomes to be made public. The reader is made aware of the potential impact this could have on both surgeons and public confidence. Liz is not a particularly likable character and we are only given a window into her pressured life but I still felt some empathy for her. Was the censure justified? Who was to blame or was the woman too ill to save? This is left for the reader to decide.
Alongside this story, in alternate brief chapters, is an account of the failed and fatal launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986. I'm not sure this worked or was necessary apart from padding the book out and demonstrating the impact of human error.… (más)

Dr. Elizabeth Taylor, the only female surgical consultant at a Wellington NZ hospital, performs abdominal surgery on a young woman suffering from sepsis related to a problem with an intrauterine device. Taylor’s bumbling registrar, a surgeon in training, cuts some major blood vessels when asked to insert a trocar drainage tube. An operation intended to clean out abdominal infection is extended because the serious bleed needs to be attended to. The patient dies early the following morning.

In a heavy-handed “ironic” twist, Dr. Taylor and a senior colleague have recently submitted an editorial to a high-profile medical journal. In their paper, the two have argued for surgical outcomes to be publicly reported. Now Dr. Taylor is to be “tested”. She didn’t commit the error (the trainee did), yet it is she who will be judged, held accountable, and ostracisized.

To drive home his message about errors, the author includes sections about the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded in 1986 only a minute and a half after being launched. When I encountered the first, out-of the blue, exceedingly dry section about the shuttle, I thought it was a publisher’s error. Apparently not. There were more of these sections to come.

While the premise of the novel initially drew me to the book, I did not have to read far to ascertain that next to nothing about it held my interest, from the main character (a stereotypically arrogant prima-donna of a surgeon) to the less-than-nuanced writing. (Dr. Taylor requests that a thrash metal song called “Angel of Death” be played on a loop while she operates on the patient who will die less than 24 hours later. Yes, really.)

With my eyeballs rolling, it was difficult to focus on the text in front of me in order to complete the (reading) procedure. The narrative was a goner before it had barely begun. One might argue it was dead on arrival. (One needs to have a certain sympathy for the surgeon for a narrative like this to work.) The risks of continuing outweighed the benefits. I closed ’er up in relief.… (más)

Carl Shuker's fifth novel A Mistake, is a confronting novel, one that makes the reader think deeply about human fallibility and the impulse to blame.

Based in Wellington after an international career in Tokyo and London, Shuker is one of the authors I'm going to hear at the Auckland Writers Festival. His writing appeals to me for the same reason that I like the novels of fellow Kiwi Lloyd Jones: he reinvents himself as an author with each title and each novel is completely different to the last one. According to Shuker's profile at the Academy of New Zealand Literature, The Method Actors (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), is an historical/thriller/love story set in Tokyo at the turn of the century. The Lazy Boys (Counterpoint, 2006) is about toxic masculinity in a NZ setting. Three Novellas for a Novel (Mansfield Road Press, 2011), is a trio of horror stories set in Tokyo, London and Cannes, and Anti Lebanon (Counterpoint, 2013), is apparently a political thriller and vampire story (really?!) set in Beirut and Syria. I decided to order A Mistake on the strength of reviews at Booksellers NZ and Alys on the Blog, and the book has turned out to be very interesting indeed.

At first glance, that cover image looks a bit like a lush tropical flower. But it's not, it's the innards of the human body and those protrusions are tweezers and a scalpel. A Mistake is about an emergency operation that goes horribly wrong and the patient dies, and the chronology of that narrative is punctuated by a parallel narrative about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, a preventable tragedy of seven deaths—caused by an apparently minor mistake rendered catastrophic by NASA's organisational culture and decision-making procedures. The high profile surgeon responsible for the deceased 24-year-old patient is the improbably named Elizabeth Taylor, and the issue of medical accountability is brought into sharp focus by a new system for making surgeon's outcomes publicly available online. For Elizabeth, the problems with this transparency system morph from being an abstract issue that she contests in the pages of a medical journal, to being a real life issue that impacts on her career and the careers of others in her team.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/28/a-mistake-by-carl-shuker/… (más)