The Good Doctor

by Damon Galgut

Overview

“A lovely, lethal, disturbing novel” of the dashed hopes of post-apartheid South Africa and the small betrayals that doom a friendship (The Guardian).
 
An extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit, The Good Doctor has inspired enthusiastic interest around the world and has assured Damon Galgut’s place as a major international talent.
 
When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not—young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one that will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling, and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank’s own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities—but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.
 
“Galgut’s prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful . . . Galgut is a master of psychological tension. . . . Tragic and brilliant.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802191496
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	474,254
File size:	862 KB

About the Author

Damon Galgut is a South African born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel A Sinless Season when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings and The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. His novel The Quarry was made into a film, which he himself co-scripted and which was released theatrically in 1998. He is also the author of the plays Echoes of Anger, Party for Mother, Alive and Kicking, and The Green’s Keeper.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last.

I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon and he appeared suddenly in the doorway, carrying a suitcase in one hand and wearing plain clothes – jeans and a brown shirt – with his white coat on top. He looked young and lost and a bit bewildered, but that wasn't why I thought what I did. It was because of something else, something I could see in his face.

He said, 'Hello ...? Is this the hospital?'

His voice was unexpectedly deep for somebody so tall and thin.

'Come in,' I said. 'Put down your bag.'

He came in, but he didn't put down the bag. He held it close while he looked around at the pink walls, the empty chairs, the dusty desk in the corner, the frail plants wilting in their pots. I could see that he thought there'd been some kind of mistake. I felt sorry for him.

'I'm Frank Eloff,' I said.

'I'm Laurence Waters.'

'I know.'

'You know ...?'

He seemed amazed that we should be expecting him, though he'd been sending faxes for days already, announcing his arrival.

'We're sharing a room,' I told him. 'Let me take you over.'

The room was in a separate wing. We had to cross an open space of ground, close to the parking lot. When he came in he must have walked this way, but now he looked at the path through the long grass, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves, as if he'd never seen them before.

We went down the long passage to the room. I'd lived and slept alone in here until today. Two beds, a cupboard, a small carpet, a print on one wall, a mirror, a green sofa, a low coffee table made of synthetic wood, a lamp. It was all basic standard issue. The few occupied rooms all looked the same, as in some featureless bleak hotel. The only trace of individuality was in the configuration of the furniture, but I'd never bothered to shift mine around till two days ago, when an extra bed had been brought in. I also hadn't added anything. There was no personality in the ugly, austere furniture; against this neutral backdrop, even a piece of cloth would have been revealing.

'You can take that bed,' I said. 'There's space in the cupboard. The bathroom's through that door.'

'Oh. Yes. Okay.' But he still didn't put down his bag.

I'd only heard two weeks before that I would have to share a room. Dr Ngema had called me in. I wasn't happy, but I didn't refuse. And in the days that followed I came around, in spite of myself, to the idea of sharing. It might not be so bad. We might get on well, it might be good to have company, my life here could be pleasantly different. So in a way I started looking forward with curiosity to this change. And before he arrived I did a few things to make him welcome. I put the new bed under the window and made it up with fresh linen. I cleared a few shelves in the cupboard. I swept and cleaned, which is something I don't do very often.

But now that he was standing here I could see, through his eyes, how invisible that effort was. The room was ugly and bare. And Laurence Waters didn't look to me like the person I'd pictured in my head. I don't know what I'd imagined, but it wasn't this bland, biscuit-coloured young man, almost a boy still, who was at last putting his suitcase down.

He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his sleeve. He put them on again and said wearily, 'I don't understand.'

'What?'

'This whole place.'

'The hospital?'

'Not just the hospital. I mean ...' He waved a hand to indicate the world out there. He meant the town outside the hospital walls.

'You asked to come here.'

'But I didn't know that it would be like this. Why?' he said with sudden intensity. 'I don't understand.'

'We can talk about it later. But I'm on duty now, I have to go back to the office.'

'I must see Dr Ngema,' he said abruptly. 'She's expecting me.'

'Don't worry about that now. You can do it in the morning. No hurry.'

'What should I do now?'

'Whatever you like. Unpack, settle in. Or come and sit with me. I'll be finished in a couple of hours.'

I left him alone and went back. He was shocked and depressed. I understood that; I'd felt it myself when I first arrived. You came expecting one thing and were met by something else completely.

You came expecting a busy modern hospital – rural maybe, and small, but full of activity – in a town where things were happening. This was the capital of what used to be one of the homelands, so whatever the morality of the politics that gave rise to it, you expected a place full of administration and movement, people coming and going. And when you'd turned off the main route to the border and were coming in on the one minor road that led here, it might still look – when you saw the place from a distance – like what you'd expected. There was the main street, leading to the centre where the fountain and the statue stood, the shop-fronts and pavements and streetlights, and all the buildings beyond. It looked neat and calibrated and exact. Not a bad place to be.

And then you arrived and you saw. Maybe the first clue was a disturbing detail; a crack that ran through an otherwise pristine wall, or a set of broken windows in an office you passed. Or the fact that the fountain was dry and full of old sand at the bottom. And you slowed down, looking around you with vague anxiety, and suddenly it all came into clear focus. The weeds in the joints of the pavements and bricks, the grass growing at places in the street, the fused lamps and the empty shops behind their blank glass fronts and the mildew and damp and blistered paint and the marks of rain on every surface and the slow tumbling down of solid structures, sometimes grain by grain, sometimes in pieces. And you were not sure any more of where you were.

And there were no people. That was the last thing you noticed, though you realized then that it was the first thing to give you that uneasy hollow feeling: the place was deserted. There was, yes, a car cruising slowly down a back road, an official uniform or two ambling along a pavement, and maybe a figure slouching on a footpath through an overgrown plot of land, but mostly the space was empty. Uninhabited. No human chaos, no movement.

A ghost town.

'It's like something terrible happened here,' Laurence said. 'That's how it feels.'

'Ja, but the opposite is true. Nothing has ever happened here. Nothing ever will. That's the problem.'

'But then how ...?'

'How what?'

'Nothing. Just how.'

He meant, how did it come to be here at all? And that was the real question. This was not a town that had sprung up naturally for the normal human reasons – a river in a dry area, say, or a discovery of gold, some kind of historical event. It was a town that had been conceived and planned on paper, by evil bureaucrats in a city far away, who had probably never even been here. Here is our homeland, they said, tracing an outline on a map, now where should its capital be? Why not here, in the middle? They made an 'X' with a red pen and all felt very satisfied with themselves, then sent for the state architects to draw up plans.

So the bewilderment that Laurence Waters felt wasn't unusual. I'd been through it myself. And so I knew that the feeling would pass. In a week or two the bewilderment would give way to something else: frustration maybe, or resentment, anger. And then that would turn into resignation. And after a couple of months Laurence would be suffering through his sentence here, like the rest of us, or else plotting a way to get out.

'But where are they all?' he said, talking more to the ceiling than to me.

'Who?'

'The people.'

'Out there,' I said. 'Where they live.'

This was hours later in my room – our room – that night. I had just put out the light and was lying there, trying to sleep, when his voice came out of the dark.

'But why do they live out there? Why aren't they here?'

'What's there for them here?' I said.

'Everything. I saw the countryside when I was driving. There's nothing out there. No hotels, shops, restaurants, cinemas ... Nothing.'

'They don't need all that.'

'What about the hospital? Don't they need that?'

I sat up on one elbow. He was smoking a cigarette and I could see the red glow rising and falling. He was on his back, looking up.

'Laurence,' I said. 'Understand one thing. This isn't a real hospital. It's a joke. When you were driving here, do you remember the last town you passed, an hour back? That's where the real hospital is. That's where people go when they're sick. They don't come here. There's nothing here. You're in the wrong place.'

'I don't believe that.'

'You'd better believe it.'

The red coal hung still for a moment, then rose and fell, rose and fell. 'But people get injured, people get sick. Don't they need help?'

'What do you think this place means to them? It's where the army came from. It's where their puppet dictator lived. They hate this place.'

'You mean politics,' he said. 'But that's all past now. It doesn't matter any more.'

'The past has only just happened. It's not past yet.'

'I don't care about that. I'm a doctor.'

I lay and watched him for a while. After a few minutes he stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill and threw the butt out of the window. Then he said one or two words I couldn't hear, made a gesture with his hands and sighed and went to sleep. It was almost instantaneous. He went limp and I could hear the regular sound of his breathing.

But I couldn't sleep. It had been years and years since I'd had to spend a night in the same room with anybody else. And I remembered then – almost incongruously, because he was nothing to me – how there had been a time, long before, when the idea of having somebody sleeping close to me in the dark was a consolation and comfort. I couldn't think of anything better. And now this other breathing body made me tense and watchful and somehow angry, so that it took hours before I was tired enough to close my eyes.

CHAPTER 2

For a long time now there had only been the seven of us: Tehogo and the kitchen staff, Dr Ngema, the Santanders and me. Once upon a time it was different. There had been an Indian woman doctor when I first arrived, but she was long gone, and a white man from Cape Town who'd got married later and emigrated. There had been four or five nurses too, but they'd been retrenched or transferred, all except Tehogo. There were too many of us to deal with the tiny trickle of human need. So when somebody went away they were never replaced, the empty space they left behind immediately sandbagged and fortified as a bastion against final collapse.

So Laurence's arrival was a mysterious event. It made no sense. When Dr Ngema told me there was a young doctor coming to do a year of community service, I thought at first that she was making a joke. I had heard about the community service – it was a new government scheme, aimed at staffing and servicing all the hospitals in the country. But we seemed too obscure to qualify.

'Why?' I said. 'We don't need anybody else.'

'I know,' she said. 'I didn't request anybody. He asked to come here.'

'He asked? But why?'

'I don't know.' She was looking in perplexity at a letter that had been faxed to her. 'We don't have a choice, Frank. We have to find a place for him.'

'Well, all right,' I said, shrugging. 'It doesn't affect me.'

Dr Ngema looked up and sighed. 'It does affect you, I'm afraid,' she said. 'I have to put him into the room with you.'

'What?'

Nothing like this had ever happened before. She saw the dismay in my face.

'It won't be for long, Frank. When the Santanders go I'll put him in there.'

'But ... we have a whole passage full of empty rooms. Why can't he go into one of those?'

'Because there's no furniture in those rooms. The only thing I can provide is a bed. But what about tables, chairs ...? He's got to sit somewhere. Please, Frank. I know it's hard. But somebody has to compromise.'

'But why me?'

'Who else, Frank?'

This wasn't a simple question. But there was one other room, down at the end of the passage, that was under dispute.

'Tehogo,' I said.

'Frank. You know that's not possible.'

'Why not?'

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and her voice rose a note or two in protest. 'Frank. Frank. What can I do? Please. I will sort something out, I promise you. But I can't just evict him.'

'You don't have to evict him. Why can't they share?'

'Because ... Tehogo isn't a doctor, you are. It makes sense for two doctors to share.'

Behind the words were other words, not spoken. It wasn't just that Laurence Waters and I were doctors; it was that we were two white men, and we belonged in a room together.

When the alarm woke me in the morning he was already up and dressed, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette.

'I want to meet Dr Ngema,' he said immediately.

'You can. But you'll have to wait a bit.'

'I could go over to her office. You don't have to take me. I could go on my own.'

'It's six in the morning, she isn't there yet. Relax, goddamn it, calm down. Have a shower or something.'

'I've already had one.'

When I went into the bathroom, the floor was swimming with water and he'd slung his damp towel over the door. There were bristles and shaving foam in the basin. My mood dropped as I cleaned up behind him, and it dropped even more when I came out again into the blue haze of his cigarette smoke. He was walking around aimlessly, puffing and thinking. When I coughed he stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill, just as he'd done last night, and threw it away.

'You can't keep doing that. You're making burn marks everywhere.'

'There isn't an ashtray. I looked.'

'I don't smoke. You'll have to buy one.'

'It's a dirty habit, I know, I must give up.' He cast around him in a feverish way, then subsided on to the bed. 'Are you ready to go?'

'I have to get dressed, Laurence. Why are you in such a hurry? There's nothing to rush for.'

'Really?'

I dressed slowly, watching him. His attention settled on me only every few seconds, then flitted off to some arbitrary detail, sometimes outside the window. He seemed pent-up and distracted for no reason that I could see. It was a quality I would come to know well in him, but on that first day it was peculiar and disturbing.

Finally I was ready. 'All right,' I said. 'We can go. But, Laurence ... your white coat. We don't really wear them here.'

He hesitated for a second, but he didn't take it off. I locked up and we went along the footpath under the heavy leaves, the light getting stronger all around. I could feel him edging towards the main block, to the office and officialdom, but I took him on a side path, to where we had breakfast. The dining room was in a third building of the hospital, along with the kitchen and the quarters for the cooking and cleaning staff, which were almost deserted by now. It was a long hall, half of which was used as a recreation room, the other half taken up by a big rectangular table, covered with a dirty cloth.

I introduced Laurence to the Santanders, Jorge and Claudia; they looked at him in startled surprise.

'You are ... new?' Jorge said.

'Yes, community service. One year.'

'Excuse,' Claudia said, 'what service you say?'

'It's a government plan,' I said. 'All new doctors have to do it. After they've qualified.'

'Ah. Ah.' But they looked at him in bemusement. They had seen a few people leave this place, but he was the first one to arrive.

A silence fell. There was always an awkwardness around me and the Santanders, but it was deepened today by Laurence, who fidgeted his way through breakfast, pushing his toast around the plate, not really eating. He made a few desultory attempts at conversation and then none of us talked any more; there was only the scraping of metal spoons on plates and laughter from the kitchen next door, before they excused themselves and left.

Then it was just him and me, staring at the other half of the long room, with its clutter of ping-pong table and black-and-white television and old magazines and boxes of games.

I think it had started to dawn on him what sort of a place this was. There was no trace left of the manic urgency from the bedroom. When he'd finished eating he lit another cigarette, but he hardly puffed at it, just sat gazing into the distance while the smoke unravelled from his fingers.

Later we went over to the main building together. There was nobody in the office, although Claudia Santander was still officially on duty and Tehogo was supposed to be around. While we waited for Dr Ngema to appear, we sat and drank coffee in silence. Years of my life, sour with caffeine, had been sipped away in this room. A clock on the wall stood silent and broken, the hands fixed for ever at ten to three. The only thing that had changed here since I arrived was the dartboard on the back of the door. I had brought it up from the recreation room one Sunday, hoping to while away some hours. But there are only so many times that you can throw a dart into a board before the idea of an aim and a target begins to lose its point.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Good Doctor"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Damon Galgut.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

What People are Saying About This

Erica Wagner

A taut exploration of the shifting landscape, cultural and moral, of the new South Africa. In recalling not only a book such as Coetzee's Disgrace, but also with a strong whiff of Graham Greene about it.
—The Times

Shaun de Waal

Galgut, one of South Africa's best novelists... In The Good Doctor Galgut's prose is beautifully understated, and it often reaches a level of thrillerish tension... If, as seems the case, the British publishing institution has a limited number of slots for South African writers at any given time, and the Booker is anything to go by, Galgut is moving into the Coetzee slot. Galgut's standing in the small South African literary community is high and likely to receive a further boost with this shortlisting.
—The Guardian

Julie Wheelwright

Galgut's story of a doctor attempting to carve out his place in a run-down local hospital vibrates with an eerie sense of foreboding... a gripping read, laced throughout with powerful emotional truth and Damon Galgut's extraordinary vision.
—The Independent

The Guardian

Galgut seems the most likely of the crop of young South African novelists to fill J.M. Coetzee's shoes.
—

Peter Kemp

Extremely good... for my money, Damon Galgut is the one to watch.
—Sunday Times

Editorial Reviews

In this gorgeously written, compellingly eerie new novel, Damon Galut offers a visceral portrait of South Africa at the crossroads of change. Young, idealistic Dr. Laurence Waters arrives at his new post in a rural hospital in South Africa only to find a dusty postcard of the past. He requested the assignment with hopes that he might make a difference in the desolate outpost, but the hospital is running on fumes: Any serious ailment is exported to larger city facilities, there is barely enough funding for staff, and the facility is too far off the beaten path to be affected by change. Laurence shares a room with the head doctor, Frank Eloff, a burned-out, disaffected hulk of a man who is both resentful of his young roommate's optimism and moved by his awkward charm. Laurence determinedly forms a friendship with his elder colleague, against all of Frank's natural instincts. But Laurence's eager desire to affect change and his firm belief in his moral duty as a doctor are at direct odds with the changing regime and the violence that prevails outside the hospital; and although Frank is temporarily buoyed by his young charge's enthusiasm, the hopes of both men come crashing down, as the harsh reality of their surroundings quashes their falsely idyllic dreams. Inviting comparisons to the work of Graham Greene and J. M. Coetzee, Galut's novel vividly captures the voice of a stranger in a strange land -- an outsider fleeing his own life who struggles to understand his adopted cultural surroundings and, in so doing, succeeds only in wreaking disaster.

bn.com

Like most elements of this slim, absorbing novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, the title is ambiguous. The narrator, Frank, is a doctor, but, to judge from our first impression, not a good one. After the collapse of his marriage, he has retreated to a hospital in a rural backwater. His uneventful existence is disturbed by the arrival of Laurence, a young doctor eager to help the poor black inhabitants of the surrounding villages. The two men develop an uneasy friendship; Frank is both repelled and fascinated by this younger version of himself. The novel shrewdly introduces thriller-like devices—a secret mistress, a male nurse with underworld ties—that put the two doctors to the test. In spare, declarative prose, Galgut spins a brisk and bracing story, but he’s also in pursuit of something murkier: the double-edged nature of doing good in a land where "the past has only just happened."

The New Yorker

Shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker prize, Galgut's fifth novel, his first to be published in the U.S., explores postapartheid South Africa's ambiguous present, where deep-rooted social and political tensions threaten any shared dream for the future. Resigned to self-exile at an inadequate hospital in a desolate former "homeland," the disillusioned Dr. Frank Eloff befriends a new volunteer: fresh-faced Dr. Laurence Waters. Determined to revivify the rural hospital and more broadly, South Africa which has slipped into humdrum dysfunction, Laurence tests Frank's stifled sensibilities and challenges hospital director Dr. Ngema, who frequently quips that she is all for "change and innovation," even though she cannot abide confrontation with her own modest authority. The young doctor's idealism eventually collides with the old power structure, the "ex-tinpot dictator of the ex-homeland" called the Brigadier and his lawless band. Neither Laurence nor Frank wholly grasps the culture and poverty of the place in which they live and are supposed to serve; they remain strangers in their own country, "traveling in a different landscape" than the black South Africans. Frank grapples with his former passivity in the face of racism and torture in the military, while Laurence pulls recklessly toward a fantastic dream of utopia, and the two doctors are "twined together in a tension that unites." But "a rope doesn't know what its own purpose is," and South Africa seems ever capable of sliding back into the mistrust and political strife of the past. Like Graham Greene's work, this quiet, affecting novel will attract those haunted by the shadow of colonialism. Agent, Valerie Duff/Toby Mundy. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Galgut (A Sinless Season) presents a series of contrasts: youth and age, idealism and pessimism, integrity and degeneration, black and white-even life and death, though this final duality is highly ironic. Set in the author's native South Africa just after apartheid, this is the story of two doctors who work in a decaying rural hospital. Laurence tries to improve the health and education of the local villagers, while the narrator, Frank, tries to pass time dispassionately, too absorbed in the hurts of his past to reach out to others. For all his efforts, however, he can't help being affected by Laurence's vitality. As Galgut shows, even one's own conscience can be misleading in this bitterly suspicious and wounded country. An intense work comparable to those of J.M. Coetzee in its evocative depictions of its characters' inner lives and the uneasy human relations caused by apartheid, this is recommended for academic libraries and for public libraries that collect literary fiction.-Amy Ford, St. Mary's Cty. Memorial Lib., Lexington Park, MD Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

One of six finalists for the ManBooker 2003, originally scheduled to appear here in March 2004, but pushed forward: a highly accomplished but unmemorable post-apartheid story in which a young doctor's best intentions end badly. Set in a poor and remote part of South Africa that was formerly one of the notorious "homelands," the tale is narrated by Frank Eloff, a doctor at a small and underused hospital. Frank is like the protagonists of so many stories about anomie and alienation, and the similarity makes the novel, despite its setting, more an intellectual cliché than an original. The hospital is headed by Dr. Ruth Ngema, who, having been promised a better posting, doesn't want to jeopardize her chances by forcing improvements. Which means that there's no response when thieves steal plumbing fixtures, and beds and buildings deteriorate. Frank, there because his wife ran off with his best friend and medical partner, takes a masochistic pleasure in living in this remote hellhole, where even the nearest town is dying. He also has a black mistress, Maria, who runs a dilapidated craft stall on the main road and is curiously reticent about the husband she claims to have. Accustomed to the tedium, Frank isn't happy when he learns he'll be sharing his room with newcomer Laurence Waters, a young doctor come to perform a year of community service. Laurence, an idealist bent on doing well, soon convinces Dr. Ngema, but not Frank, whose own ideals were lost while serving in the apartheid army, to set up clinics in the villages. The clinics are a huge success, but good intentions can't compete with the realities of crime and corruption as the army arrives and sets up camp in the town. The soldiersare ostensibly there to track drug dealers, check corruption, and patrol the border for illegal crossings, but their activities seem increasingly more malevolent. A hospital worker is mysteriously wounded and nearly dies, and, on a night when Laurence is on duty, both he and his patient are abducted. Frank, too, soon finds his life dramatically changing. Carefully, admirably crafted but, overall, unaffecting. Agent: Tony Peake

Kirkus Reviews

Galgut’s prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful.... Galgut is a master of psychological tension.… Tragic and brilliant.…”
Globe and Mail

“Damon Galgut has written a lovely, lethal, disturbing novel.”
–The Guardian (U.K.)

“Exquisite.… It is a testament to Galgut’ s skill that this mostly quiet novel can leave such a lasting sense of urgency. And shame. That, after all, is what great fiction is meant to do.”
–Denver Post

“Possesses the economy and pace of Hemingway and the lyrical grace of Graham Greene.…”
–Booklist

“A truly remarkable novel, steeped in contemporary history, yet at the same time transcending it. I was enthralled by its intensity and the immediacy of every small twist and turn of the story.”
–André Brink

“A tremendous brave book. The author never flinches, and makes his hero’s dark logic compelling and hair-rising. . . . Galgut writes like a man on a long fast night drive through bad places.… It’ s brilliant.”
–Dermot Healy

“From the first page the reader is gripped by a rare twinning of convictions: that it is strange and new, and that the imaginative rendering is of the highest quality.… There are traces of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut is a true original.”
–Geoff Dyer

“If there is a posterity, The Good Doctor will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa’s transition, a novel that is in every way the equal of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.… [Galgut is] a novelist of great and growing power.”
–Rian Malan

From the Publisher