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| The Doctor is Sick | |
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| Author | Anthony Burgess |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Comic novel |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton (New York, London) |
| Publication date | 1960 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 261 pages (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-393-31602-5 (Paperback edition) |
The Doctor is Sick is a 1960 novel by Anthony Burgess.
According to his autobiography, Burgess composed the book in just six weeks. He wrote it after his return to England from Malaya in a burst of literary activity that also produced Devil of a State, A Clockwork Orange, The Right to an Answer and several other works.
Contents |
Plot Introduction
The "doctor" of the title is Edwin Spindrift, Ph.D., an unhappily married professor of linguistics who has been sent home from Burma to England suffering from a mysterious brain ailment.
While Edwin is confined to a neurological ward, undergoing a battery of diagnostic tests, Mrs. Spindrift amuses herself with some disreputable new friends at the surrounding pubs. Sometimes, to Edwin's distress, she sends these friends to keep her husband company during visiting hours, rather than come herself.
Most of the novel is a dream sequence: while anesthetised for brain surgery, Edwin's anxiety over his wife and the company she keeps turns into a slightly surrealistic fantasy in which Edwin leaves the hospital and encounters his wife's friends, with whom he has various adventures.
Background and sources
Shortly before he wrote The Doctor is Sick, the author suffered an obscure mental breakdown that ended his foreign service career; he based some of the novel's events on his resulting confinement to London's Neurological Institute.
Burgess's description of life in a hospital ward is particularly vivid, as is his account of the bizarre and sometimes grisly medical tests to which Edwin is subjected. The book is also notable for the variety of English dialects represented: like his protagonist, Burgess was a philologist, and he shows a playful virtuosity in drafting phonetically accurate renditions of lower-class London speech.
The novel's "Doctor Railton", who is in charge of Edwin's case, is a fictionalised version of Sir Roger Bannister, who in real life performed neurological tests on Burgess.
Extracts
| “ | Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.
The window opened gently and a still autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil. He walked down the side street to a wide thoroughfare of shop-windows and offices. This, he assumed, was one of the main arteries of London, a city he did not know very well. There were sodium street-lights, lights in windows. Occasional cars sped by. There was even an airline bus crammed with yawning passengers. Edwin saw himself reflected in a window full of tape-recorders. The London office of the International Council for University Development was in Queen Street. Edwin hesitated outside, adjusting his cap, tightening the knot of his tie, smoothing his pyjama collar. The portals, a naked sculptural group above them emblematic of the Tutorial System, were designed to intimidate. The doors were all glass and hence appeared to be ever-open; this again must be emblematic of something. Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho. |
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References
- Lewis, Roger: Anthony Burgess (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
