Medicine and multimedia: The Giant, O’Brien
Authors: Bertram Cohen
Journal: BMJ (1998)

Hilary Mantel


Fourth Estate, £14.99, pp 210 




ISBN 1 85702 884 8

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Rating: ★

This book is beautifully produced with clear, well spaced print, but what at first sight seems an artistic and original cover is almost identical to that of The Irish Giant by Frankcom and Musgrave, published in 1976. The attempt to weave a historical novel around the life of John Hunter is, of course, not original, but Garet Rogers’ Brother Surgeons, written in 1957, is in every way a more credible, more colourful, and much more readable account of life in those tumultuous times.

In this book, with O’Brien as its central character, quasi-Irish storytelling occupies much of the chronicle, but Mantel fails dismally to match up to those traditional skills. Far from emulating the picturesque banter and the penetrating wit of Irish discourse, her narrative style has such lack of precision and indeterminate construction that the conversations of her characters seem like the ramblings of people under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. Perhaps this was intended to convey a sense of the alcoholic miasma in which many of these events took place. That, however, cannot excuse the phantasmagorical account of Hunter’s bout of illness in his later years.

The brutality of capital punishment in 18th century England has been repeatedly recorded in literature. Mantel’s ploy of having one of her characters recite the names of dozens of Irish men and women who had been hanged leads naturally to O’Brien’s inquiry, “Dear God, was the whole country of Ireland hanged, and not one spared?” However, death on the scaffold, with the accompanying euphemisms spawned by the black humour of the day, was by no means the prerogative of any particular racial group. The theme of the wicked English is never far away: “‘They say,’ said Mary, ‘that the road from Ireland to Heaven is a beaten track, worn smooth with the feet of all who tread it; but the road from England is grassed and flowery, for it is walked but once in a decade.’ ”

Away from the Irish element, activities attributed to Hunter, his brother, and his wife stretch the limits of literary licence. Even Hunter’s famous observation about his physical frailty in his last years—to the effect that his life lay in the hands of any rascal who might choose to annoy him—is manipulated by Mantel to suit her own peculiarly unpleasant agenda. William Hunter, a cultured man of immense attainment, is never portrayed as anything more than an ill tempered, maladjusted misanthrope. Referring to her lurid description of John Hunter “inoculating himself with syphilis,” Mantel adds a footnote to the effect that this is controversial (although she chooses to accept the notorious myth). No one has researched this myth more thoroughly than the late George Qvist, who concluded that “the suggestion that John Hunter was a martyr to science [by self inoculation with syphilis] is sheer romantic sentimentality” and he hoped that a dispassionate reappraisal of all the facts would eradicate the delusion. It seems unlikely that this conclusion and the evidence in support of it could have been unearthed in any research that preceded Mantel’s writing of her book.

Equally undisturbed by essential research is the fanciful portrayal of Charles Byrne—the victim of a pituitary adenoma, with all its debilitating attendant effects—as a man of enormous strength, able to overcome single handed an attack by four footpads attempting to rob him of the large sum of money collected from his freak show.

Coming from an experienced author, this book has to be classed as an unusually disappointing potboiler depending, it would seem, on the outlandish and the macabre to attract a readership.