by Vincent LamMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Well, what a mess. There must have been a storyline somewhere in this book, but it got lost in the jumble of medical terms and half-baked verbal polaroids of failed attempts at CPR.
What did I take from this book? That there are way more failures than successes in emergency rooms. That doctors take deaths as a marginally important daily occurrence, and that they regard having to perform CPR as a time consuming nuisance. All the doctor-characters in the book are interconnected, but they never develop into real persons. Except the brief romance at the beginning between Ming and Fitzgerald, they don't interact with each other, and their eventual connection is only stated in doctor-like brief statements through the book. The author uses their relationships only as props for much overdone ER scenes. The result is a shallow story with too much unnecessary medical jargon, which fails either to develop into a real story, or to glorify the medical practice, presuming either of those was the author's intention. The book reads with as much appeal as the Human Anatomy Atlas.
It's beyond my comprehension how was it awarded the Giller Prize. Must have been slim pickings for the Gillers that year! Doctor Vincent Lam shouldn't leave his day job for writing.
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