The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr GlasAbseDannie194 pp Price £6.99 ISBN 1-86105-650-8 (p/b) London: Robson Books, 2003
Authors: Chris Nunn
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2003)

Dannie Abse, physician, poet and novelist, has many talents. In his latest novel the poet shows through. Words of rare aptitude abound. The meaning is many-layered and shot through with ambiguity. Subplots proliferate. The main story is simple enough, however. Dr Simmonds, an emotionally costive GP, conscientious and well-intentioned, becomes erotically obsessed by the wife of one of his patients. Aided by an out-of-print Swedish novel (Dr Glas), he fantasizes about killing or otherwise neutralizing her Jewish husband, who eventually goes into status asthmaticus. The doctor is summoned in the middle of the night. His patient fails to respond to the standard treatments. In a moment of emotional confusion, he gives a shot of morphine and the husband ends up with permanent anoxic brain damage. Dr Simmonds, thrown into a turmoil of doubt over his motives, takes poison that he had originally obtained with some idea of giving it to his patient. A somewhat grand guignol plot, it might be thought, but one that is rendered most believably and is not too remote from occasional sad realities.

What is the novel actually about? According to the blurb on the back, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer considered it to show ‘subtle acuity’ on the topic of anti-Semitism, and this is certainly a subtheme—one that could hardly have been avoided given the setting of the story in Hampstead, circa 1950. A more central theme has to do with the power of a certain type of woman to orchestrate the emasculation of any men in her life, and end up devoting herself to the care of the survivors. But perhaps, in the work of a poet, one should not look for clear intellectual pathways to meaning so much as the emotional tone. The overall feeling here is one of claustrophobia.

The horizons of all the main protagonists in the book, apart from the husband before his brain damage, are so narrow. There is the narrow austerity, beautifully described, of the Attlee years. The GP, though a good man in a small way, is confined to a vague humanitarianism spiritually, while his emotional life centres on his dead mother. The intellectual life of Hampstead is shown as petty at best. There are rags and tatters of Freudian thinking, while Pirandello is on at the theatre and Schoenberg on the radio. Arid stuff indeed. Above all, there is the constricted professional life and outlook involved in being a GP. Lest one be tempted to assume that this was inevitable for a single-handed doctor fifty years ago and is different now, we are shown how it was an exciting time to be such a doctor. New antibiotics were allowing cures impossible previously, while the NHS was just settling in, with all sorts of fresh ideas required and adjustments to be made.

Many of us probably are, or have been, living in a world just as constricted as that of Dr Simmonds. We may not be so professionally isolated as he, but the new bureaucracies and management structures can hardly be regarded as life-enhancing. When patients and one of his friends try to point out to the doctor that he should take notice of a wider, more generous world, he does not quite understand what they are getting at. Yet he is a good doctor by any normal standards. A 21st century true story may help to confirm that Dr Simmonds' narrowness is still with us. A newborn baby was found to have neutropenia. The only immediate action required was to keep it away from obvious sources of infection and wait to see whether the white count would rise naturally over the course of a month or two. The parents were told to bring it immediately to a paediatrician in a centre of excellence. Very sensibly, they demurred. The necessary blood tests could be taken at home, and it is well known that hospitals abound with sources of infection. They explained all this several times, but were nevertheless labelled ‘difficult parents’ and accused of lack of interest in the welfare of their baby. When they asked why the hospital visit was necessary at this stage, no clear answer was given though someone suggested that the blood tests would be ‘fresher’ if taken in hospital.

Tales like this tend nowadays to be greeted with a shrug and some dismissive remark about the NHS. What this novel shows, though, is that one should be concerned about the state of the doctors (and, no doubt, the other staff) involved in this sort of occurrence, for their own sakes as well as that of their patients. For doctors at least, the meaning of the book is clear—Get a life! If you don't, the life that you've got may get you.