A Mistake

The story of a high stakes surgery going wrong, and how the tragedy impacts and ripples through the surgical team, family of the patient, associated staff at Wellington Hospital and eventually the broader health community and the New Zealand public.

This widening scope is conveyed from the perspective of the surgeon Elizabeth Taylor (I chose to read this a nod to Ballard, but could be anything, really), an ambitious, talented, driven, hyperfocused woman who has risen to the top of her field through sheer bloody mindedness and a determination to exert control over her career path in the boy’s club of surgery and the broader academic/health industrial complex.

Unique to this novel (at least, I haven’t read anything like this before) is the focus on the corporatised district health system and its high performance culture. The system is substantialised and characterised through a series of detailed analytical digressions, while its human impact is shown through punchy conversations and dialogue that cranks up the social awkwardness and fractious forced-neutrality of a setting where the whitewashed expectations of Western professionalism mask the underlying human reality of life and death, fear and hope, blood and guts. When characters smile in this novel, it’s the literal embodiment of this corporate masking. Very little of Elizabeth’s interiority and inner space is explored directly in the prose, but each described smile gives the reader access to the character’s underlying reality through a kind of negative space. Through the responses of friends and colleagues to her wisecracks and masked smiles, we can triangulate the breakdown of the character from an outrageous, blunt-talking high-performer in the zone of flow where control and challenge are perfectly balanced, to an individual unmoored from the place she’s supposed to be but unable to slow down or direct her forward trajectory.

If the Challenger disaster provides a kind of framework for Elizabeth’s titular mistake, her character trajectory is like the SRBs which continued flying on wildly fluctuating vectors beyond the fireball of the disintegrating launch vehicle. Perhaps then, her inevitable collision with DHB disciplinary proceedings and negative media attention mirrors the range control executing the self-destruct mechanism preventing further flight. It’s easy for this symbolism to come across as overbearing or over the top in the format of these notes, but it’s really not how it works in the story—it’s subtle and punchy and reinforces the themes really well without telegraphing too much. The notes on Challenger are also particularly well written. I’ve read about this stuff over and over again, but here they are so well edited and precise, that they reveal new layers of meaning and detail to an event that’s so well trodden. Not all readers will appreciate this, but I was fascinated to learn that medical professionals too—just like software engineers, myself included—are obsessed with stories of complex systems failure.

A few things to think about with how the setting lands. Despite some great scenes set in Auckland and Queenstown, this is very much a Wellington novel. That doesn’t detract from its universiality, but because I grew up in Wellington and know the geography of the story intimately, it’s hard to know how this comes across in general. Interestingly, the only thing that really stood out at me as flawed or inconsistent while reading was related to the geography and setting. A jagged contrast of description caught my attention, mostly to do with a scene where on-edge Elizabeth speeds around narrow winding streets of South Wellington in her car. Earlier in the book, the description of a rennovated borgeois Kelburn villa was so real it hurt nearly as much as the pain and tension of the story, and many subtle hints throughout the story created immersion in a dry, windy Wellington summer. But in the later scene, it felt like this broke apart a little, with a confusing enumeration of street names and locations that didn’t evoke the sights, smells, noises of Wellington so clearly, which kind of broke me out of the trance a little. Although, to be perfectly honest, this 170 km/h blasting around Wellington streets still worked on me like a gut punch, recalling actual moments from my own life (when I still drove a car), dealing/not-dealing with the sudden and tragic death of one of my friends.

Also, what’s going on with the violence against dogs in several of Shuker’s books? Am still wondering whether this is a coincidence or somewhat more directed. Here it lands devastatingly as a plot point, as well as reinforcing themes relating to control and care and mirroring/echoing the main story event in domestic space.

A tense masterpiece that sets a new standard for New Zealand novels.