Books

Published: 01/08/2002, Volume II2, No. 5816 Page 30 31

Bodies By Jed Mercurio Publisher: Jonathan Cape. ISBN: 0224061976. 368 pages.

£10.99 (paperback).

Idly staring out from behind your oh-so-cool shades, while lazily draped over a sun-lounger on a sandy beach, your eye may wander to the beautiful bodies absorbing the sun's rays as they turn a golden shade of melanoma.

Depending on your state of mind, you may find this the right moment to immerse yourself in Jed Mercurio's novel Bodies.

Mercurio first came to public attention when he scripted the excellent BBC2 series Cardiac Arrest in the late 1990s - a wickedly black hospital drama that was effectively a manifesto for the British Medical Association's junior doctors committee.Bodies takes the tale a stage further, charting the life of a newly qualified house officer from his first day on the wards.

It describes him being sucked into the alien environment that is the bowels of a modern city hospital.

There he is stripped of his ideals, humanity, family, fiancee, morals and health as medicine turns him into a dispensing zombie.

Not for the squeamish, Bodies is a compelling but miserable rant.

Mercurio is unforgiving in his description of a healthcare process and profession which he finds corrupt, uncaring and harmful.

He is obsessed with decay - in buildings, bodies and minds - which he enthusiastically describes through gratuitous evocations of bodily functions and fluids.

The novel's intentions are clear - to strip away the gloss and veneer of TV thrillers and melodrama - and it accomplishes this well.There are no heroes.Lives are not saved and glamour is banished.Patients are conditions and acronyms, not names.

Sleep deprivation terrorises the awakened hours.

However, the unremitting misery and bleakness are just a little too far removed from anybody's experiences to do justice to the book's messages.

One of the novel's central plots examines issues of clinical incompetence and professional coverup.Readers will be familiar with aspects of the situation described, but the totality of it just does not ring true.

Bodies also feels dated.Attitudes and scenarios are described that may well have existed when Dr Mercurio staggered around the wards more than a decade ago.They take no account of the seismic shift that medicine has undergone in the last 10-15 years. It is as if Bristol, Shipman and Ledward had never happened.

HSJ readers might be disconcerted by the fact that management is mentioned only once - in an aside about an attempt to promote more appropriate dress code among medical staff.This is quite revealing, suggesting that in junior doctors'minds at least, management is a complete irrelevance.

Ultimately, Bodies is an essential if unsatisfying and frequently infuriating read. It has a point of view and state of mind which is rarely captured but evidently exists.There is still room in the market for a polemic about British hospitals and doctors.But if you want a taste of some of the atmosphere of the junior doctors'mess - in which, reports suggest, Bodies has been very well circulated and received - read it.