Galgut makes for troubling reading

By William Gallagher BBC News Online

South African writer Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel The Good Doctor.

A troubling page-turner, this novel goes out of its way to tell us that its story is straightforward and simple but it also manages to leave you disturbed.

The good doctor of the title is Laurence Waters who chooses to work at a particularly rundown and ineffective hospital in rural South Africa.

Through him and another doctor named Frank, Galgut shows us a deadening world of bureaucracy and decay where a hospital is empty and rarely used.

Galgut's novel has a tragic ending

It is a curiously vivid description of what feels like stasis but it fashions a world where the smallest moment can be seen to have huge consequences - the friendship between Frank and Laurence is complex yet believable tinderbox.

So when Laurence overcomes stagnation to get the hospital working again, it feels like someone winning against the tide and you root for him even as you simultaneously fear that things cannot end well.

As the narrator, Frank shapes what we learn of the hospital and what we should think of the characters but he seems to unknowingly reveal that the deadening has reached inside him, too.

Right from the start you are arrested by what is happening, even when at first it seems to be very little, and without giving anything away, the ending is tragic but well done.