THE ROYAL FREE by Carl Shuker — Review by Stella

Carl Shuker’s The Royal Free has been sitting with me for a while. I finished this novel in two minds. Was it just clever, but slightly irritating? Or was it brilliant and unsettling? Distance has made the novel grow fonder. Sometimes you read a novel for its absorbing plot, page-turning qualities and when you close the cover and come up for air you declare it wonderful, but give yourself a few months and it’s often hard to pinpoint the substance of the story. It was absorbing at the time. Of course, there are those novels which you circle back to, that stay with you for random reasons across years and through experience. The Royal Free is neither of these, but it is something. When I reviewed A Mistake, it was all scalpel fine cuts — a novel that would leave a scar. I reckon The Royal Free is more rash-inducing. 
This is probably relevant with a six-month baby in the mix and James Ballard (our main guy) an editor at a medical journal, the latter's impetuous (rash) behaviour driven by frustration and grief, and the violence that permeates the novel, both on a personal and society level. (James Ballard may even claim that errors in texts creep into the lines and pages of the articles he edits a bit like an unwanted disease if he was pushed to!). It’s London 2011: there’s disharmony in the air, riots on the streets and a distinct collision of worlds. In The Royal Free this clash is played out through the office and the estate where James and baby Fiona live, and through the stories of other characters and their own particular circumstances. James is our guide through all this. After all, he is writing the style guide, and Shuker is playing puppet master, as novelists are want to do. If they're not in charge, who is? The editor? There are literary tricks and editorial in-jokes here, not all of which I caught, but enough to know that Shuker is playfully throwing a rule book in the air with some irony, while also respecting the word on the page, of which this writer is a master. And beyond the word play, the often hilarious and uncomfortable office dynamics (laugh and weep), there is a tender story about parenting, grief, and the unexpected consequences of violence on an individual and society at large. Here is a disintegration; a breaking down of expectation and logic. James Ballard is a quandary. What kind of parent leaves his baby alone to go for a run in the park? An action which plays on repeat in Ballard’s mind, which spirals to something increasingly problematic. Yet he is performing his tasks to the letter, caring for Fiona, and attempting to adjust to life without his wife. And yet he will reach out and touch danger. What is this impulse that compels us to be so complex? The Royal Free is, I think, brilliant and unsettling, and a little vexing. A bit like Mr Ballard!