The Doctor is Sick by Anthony Burgess

How bloody stupid he had been to trust Dr Railton and everyone else.  To them he was already a thing, could not be less of a thing if he died under the anaesthetic: regrettable: Dr. Spindrift has changed into a mere chunk of morphology.

Back in 2016, as I chronicled on my thrilling Twitter account, I came upon an impressive collection of modern literary fiction in trade paperback at a Goodwill in Ohio.  One of the books I bought for 99 pennies was a late '90s W. W. Norton printing of Anthony Burgess's 1960 novel The Doctor is Sick, the story of Dr. Edwin Spindrift and the radical turn his life takes.   

Edwin Spindrift is an English linguistics professor with an American degree and a teaching job in Burma.  He has plenty of problems.  He has lost his libido.  His sense of smell is all mixed up.  He collapsed in the middle of class, and so he and his wife Sheila have returned to England, where he is undergoing tests in a London hospital while Sheila stays in a nearby hotel.  Long ago, Edwin and Sheila, who seems kind of vapid and is quite keen on drinking and fucking, agreed to have an open marriage, and Sheila has been spending a lot of time in pubs, hitting the sauce and picking up guys.  She is so busy with those other guys she doesn't avail herself of opportunities to come see Edwin in the hospital--some visiting hours he spends alone, while others he shares with the somewhat creepy working class and lower class guys Sheila has met in pubs and sent to the hospital in her place!

Burgess, a linguist himself, fills the novel with loads of "fun facts" philological and etymological that Edwin offers up to an uninterested audience.

'Ye Old Tea Shop is a solecism.  The "Ye" is a mistake for the Anglo-Saxon letter called thorn, which stood for "TH".'

Burgess also describes in some detail various medical procedures from the point of view of the patient--some of these are not for the squeamish!  These descriptions provide the author an opportunity to lay some interesting metaphors on us; for example, when a "negro" and his Italian assistant shave Edwin's head in preparation for brain surgery, the falling hair is compared to autumn leaves and then Arabic script and the strokes of Pitman shorthand.            

One of the noteworthy things about The Doctor is Sick is the diverse panorama of people living, working and making trouble in the London depicted, from the hospital where Edwin endures all manner of tests and interacts with various wacky fellow patients, to the drinking establishments Sheila frequents, and to the streets: not only are there people from different social strata and various geographic locations within the British Isles, but also Americans, "negros," Italians, Slavs, Germans, "Semites," etc.  Some quotes from T. S. Eliot that the learned Edwin throws out (all through the novel he is demonstrating his erudition to those who have no ability to appreciate it) made me wonder if the multitude of foreigners and minorities in the novel were meant to play one of the roles played by London-dwelling Jews and foreigners in Eliot's early poems like "The Waste Land" and "Gerontion," as a dramatization of the alienation and deracination characteristic of the modern globalized city.  (Spoiler alert: Maybe she should see The Doctor is Sick as the story of an Englishman who, after studying in America and working in Burma, gets back in touch with his British roots and settles down in England.)   There is considerable interethnic strife depicted in the novel, between Jews and German and between whites and blacks in particular.  (Here is where I warn you 21st-century kids that the book makes frequent use of the dreaded "N-word" that those of us with no balls are now too scared to type.)

(I also saw Edwin's sad sexual relationships as possibly echoing the sad sexual relationships in Eliot's early poems.)

Edwin is certainly alienated, a man apart from society, even apart from real life--as an intellectual, a man of words, he has no knowledge of, no feeling for, the world of flesh and blood people.  Midway through the book Edwin reflects that 

He had lived too much with words and not what the words stood for...Apart from its accidents of sound, etymology and lexical definition, did he really know the meaning of any one word?

Edwin has no ability to relate to the people around him; between him and most of those in the hospital lay barriers of race, ethnicity, sex and class, and even the British male doctors seem to be rejecting him from their club when they forget to call Edwin "Dr. Spindrift" and instead call him "Mr. Spindrift."  (Burgess makes much in the novel of homophones and words that have multiple meanings, and "doctor" is one of them.)

Remarking to himself that the hospital staff do not think of him as human, but as a mere thing, 75 pages into the 261 page novel Edwin decides to flee the hospital, right before he is to have his brain operated upon. 

Unfamiliar with London, his head shaved, clad in a weird assortment of pyjamas and street clothes, Edwin's alienation is even more stark.  Sheila has moved out of her hotel with all their money and without leaving any clue as to her whereabouts, and when Edwin visits the global HQ of The International Council for University Development, the institution that manages that school in Burma, he is refused any advance on his salary.  When Edwin finds himself in a dispute with an illiterate man who has stolen his watch, passersby take the side of the thief, Edwin's unusual attire making them think him a foreigner. 

Looking for Sheila, Edwin goes to the pub and illegal drinking club where Sheila has been hitting the sauce and meeting men and he gets mixed up in the sundry petty criminal schemes of the people who hang out there, many of whom try to take advantage of him one way or another.  He plays shove-ha'penny, something I've never heard about before, for high stakes.  He is kidnapped by a predatory homosexual masochist.  He is persuaded by the operators of the illegal drinking club, a pair of Jewish twins who constantly talk about money and the tragic history of their people and who have a long tragic history of disreputable and illicit money-making schemes of their own behind them, to give a linguistics lecture to their patrons in hopes it will deceive the police about the true nature of their club.  These same operators shanghai Edwin into participating in a televised contest for the best-looking bald man in town ("MAMMOTH CONTEST: BALD ADONIS OF GREATER LONDON").  Edwin, a relatively young and handsome man who of course is not really bald, merely shaved, wins the contest and becomes famous. 

Then he wakes up in the hospital after his operation and he and we must consider what proportion of his adventures were dreams induced by anesthesia and coma and what proportion really happened.  Regardless of whether they were mostly or entirely imaginary, his adventures have changed Edwin, and he has a future to look forward to in which he is free of Sheila and free of his connection with The International Council for University Development and any need to return to Burma, with a job outside of academia in prospect.  Edwin is also free of his inhibitions against breaking the law--on his way out of the hospital he loots the lockers of his fellow inmates.   

The theme of alienation may have jumped out at me, but another big theme of The Doctor is Sick is freedom and confinement.  Not only is Edwin confined in the hospital and then in the masochist's fortified top floor apartment, and both he and Sheila trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage, but many secondary and minor characters talk about their personal histories of being imprisoned for crimes and held in thrall by criminals, and their ethnic groups' histories of suffering oppression and enslavement.

We might see the story of Edwin as a tale of liberation from the confines of sterile intellectualism and a sterile marriage, but Burgess may be doing more than celebrating freedom here; he also portrays the costs that one might suffer and might impose on others when flouting the social order in pursuit of independence and freedom of action.  Shelia refuses to be confined by the conventional rules of marriage, but can we admire a woman who doesn't even take time to visit her dangerously ill husband in the hospital?  And are we really to see it as a positive development when Edwin's desperation after busting out of the hospital and failing to find Sheila leads him to turn to thievery with gusto, and when his struggle with the gay masochist unleashes within Edwin a lust for violence?  

The Doctor is Sick is a good novel, but I'm not in love with it.  The jokes work, but they made me smile, not laugh out loud.  Burgess is of course some kind of genius with a vast storehouse of knowledge about language and literature and every page has some clever wordplay or exotic slang or double meaning or erudite reference (I caught the Eliot references and an obvious Shakespeare quote but presumably there are legions of references that sailed right over my uneducated cabeza) which of course is good.  But Burgess also puts his remarkable facility with dialects and accents to use doing something which is a pet peeve of mine, rendering long stretches of dialogue phonetically.

Can't 'ave you marchin' rahnd wiv all vat leg showin'.  Indecent, apart from anyfink else.  What a bleedin' evenin' vis is turnin' aht to be.

Perhaps I'm a lazy or impatient reader, but I find reading such passages laborious.  I'm also not exactly crazy about the equivocal "was it all a dream?" ending.  

All in all, though, The Doctor is Sick is a worthwhile read that is fertile ground for all kinds of interpretations and deconstructions. Ninety-nine cents well spent!