Book of the week: THE ROYAL FREE by Carl Shuker
If this isn’t on your summer reading pile, it should be! The sixth novel from Aotearoa novelist Carl Shuker is equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum.
In The Royal Free James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).
Managing his boring, but ‘essential’ job, office politics and eccentric colleagues, alongside his grief, and the disintegration of society — London is literally on fire — Ballard is the central (but not the only) voice of The Royal Free, steering us through the dilemmas at hand: civilisation crumbling, a health system keeling, and a crisis, both political and personal, crashing in.
The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs*).
“His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener
”Few writers have such a feel for the rhythm of a sentence. Tremendously enjoyable. The novel packs a powerful punch.” —John McCrystal, Newsroom