Voodoo, rape and an apple tree

A summary of the events that take place in this novel might run as follows: a lost boy (who may be the soul of a comatose adult) walks around a hospital with an apple tree growing inconveniently in his stomach. He explores most of the floors, some of which are in a different dimension, and meets, among others, the kinky ‘Rubber Nurse’. Elsewhere, Nurse Swallow loves Mr Steele, a handsome surgeon. Nikki Froth, a prostitute, is hiding from her drug-addled pimps, Spanner and Case. PC Dixon loves Nikki. Sir Reginald Saint-Hellier, the head surgeon, leads a Satanist cult which murders babies and rapes virgins on the building’s 13th floor. Haitian porters perform voodoo rituals. Half way through the novel, the world outside the hospital disappears, those inside become immortal and the dead resurrect.

Having once spent the small hours in St George’s Hospital, Tooting, I found some of this a good deal more familiar than the author probably intended. Overall, though, Hospital is a work which deliberately refuses to draw the reader into a recognisable fictional setting. It is a 500-page novel with no plot (just lots of strands and episodes), no characters (just dozens of grotesques) and, on one view, no purpose other than to act as a huge canvas for many disparate aperçus, some of which are brilliant, others not. In places the writing is intentionally hopeless: ‘He was gorgeous and efficient, a surgical whizz and the most handsome man she’d ever seen’. Elsewhere it is monumentally long-winded; a description of the A&E unit begins: ‘Here came twisted ankles, dog bites, sprained wrists’ and ends 50 lines later: ‘Here came the dying and the almost-dead and the dead’. By then, some readers will have thought ‘you’ve made your point’ and begun skimming that section, but the point, arguably, is the disconcerting length of the description itself.