The Royal Free
by Carl Shuker

One of the sly pleasures of Carl Shuker’s last novel, the Ockham NZ Book Awards- shortlisted A Mistake (2019), was its nod to dystopian British writer JG Ballard. The surgeon central character in A Mistake is named Elizabeth Taylor, not so much for the actress as for the fetishist fantasy of her in Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash. A Mistake even parodies Crash’s road accident-seeking (and causing) motorway madness with Taylor’s considerably less high-octane speeding through the streets of Wellington’s southern suburbs in a Toyota Camry.

In his new novel, The Royal Free, Shuker goes one better – or more obvious – with his central character, who is named James Ballard. Like the writer, he is widowed, although Shuker’s Ballard is the 38-year-old New Zealander father of a baby daughter. JG Ballard was left alone with three older children after his wife died. But then The Royal Free is full of famous names for characters: Oliver Reed, Edward Woodward, Death. There’s a lawyer called Jarndyce. I’m surprised there isn’t a Carl Shuker, à la the Martin Amis in Amis’s 1984 novel Money. This is the postmodern territory we’re in here.

The novel is set largely in the offices of the fictitious Royal London Journal of Medicine, which appeared fleetingly in A Mistake, Shuker having worked for several years for the real British Medical Journal. It’s a mix of workplace novel and a depiction of the troubled city in which that workplace and its workers live.

As when you start any job, it takes time to find your bearings: who’s who? Who’s interesting and worth pal-ing around with and who isn’t? Is that still the same after a week in their company? What exactly does the job entail? What are all these technical terms people are bandying about? Will you ever get the in-jokes?

Shuker takes the reader through this with great skill, sketching out his characters and subtly filling in their lives and foibles with compassion yet a sense of the comic. Names may be PoMO but characters are closely observed and delineated. They feel genuine despite all the artifice.

Whether it’s a fictional paper company in Slough in The Office or the spies’ Slough House in Slow Horses, the workplace is a TV drama staple, but less so in novels, notwithstanding notable exceptions (those Mick Herron books on which Slow Horses is based, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, etc).

Journalism novels are common enough, but generally concentrate on the reporting rather than copy-editing side of things (even though authors such as Graham Greene were copy editors themselves). Some wag once described copy editors as ‘the inky fingers of mediocrity’ – I say this as a former copy editor myself. Shuker prefers to have one of his characters note that ‘copy editors’ is an exact anagram of ‘disco poetry’. Much better. Shuker is to be commended for taking this unglamorous activity and transforming it into (or simply capturing?) an epic, heroic endeavour. Or at least mock heroic.

Although my own journalism career was spent in the less rarefied world of newspapers and magazines, I recognise the staff dynamics and torturous decision-making processes and discussions Shuker writes about. And, of course, many facets are common to all workplaces:  the rituals, the banter, the hapless person telling a bad ‘funny’ story badly. I particularly appreciated Shuker’s hilariously detailed and reverential account of stylebook considerations.

It is the stylebook: it is civil society, the model institution, the great modernist novel, organised life, man as an ordered political animal, civilisation, and its critique.

Hopefully, those without the same journalistic background will be as entertained by The Royal Free and not bored. Entering Christmas party season, I’m all too aware of the glazed-over expression people get when you talk about the intricacies of your job.

As it happens, my formative journalism years were spent in the area where Shuker’s Ballard lives. My first flat was a few streets from the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead that features in the novel and my wedding reception was in a Polish vodka bar around the corner from the Marks & Spencer outlet Shuker writes about (although in my day it was a cinema). My bus ride home to a later flat would have taken me past Ballard’s apartment. I mention this merely to confirm the exactitude with which Shuker describes this locale.

Outside of the office, The Royal Free is about the disintegrating social fabric of a contemporary London. I say ‘a’ because this London straddles Shuker’s imagination and the less pronounced present-day problems of the real city. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise is the reference point here, with The Royal Free echoing its themes of architectural alienation and urban malaise.

Shuker’s title puns on several levels, reflecting the names of both the Royal London Journal of Medicine and the Royal Free Hospital. If the brutalist behemoth of the hospital qualifies as high-rise (minus High-Rise’s incest, murder and cannibalism), Ballard’s apartment in a modish modernist terrace nonetheless reeks of dread through its proximity to failed state housing, tower blocks, burned-out cars, a marauding gang of youths, and their leaders’ Rhodesian ridgeback dog, an enigmatic, possibly supernatural, canine destined to play a noble and valiant role before the novel is over.

Shuker is good on the terrors from which money and a middle-class home can’t protect you in London when you’re living cheek by jowl with poverty and crime. There are knifings, riots. London’s burning! Some of this is heightened in the novel in a JG Ballard way, some of it could have been ‘ripped from the pages’ of the Daily Mail and its hysteria about ‘lawless London’. But some of it is all too familiar to anyone who has lived in the city.

I do question Shuker identifying his main tormentor and another of his gang as Black, even if one gang member is White – by way of, what, balance? This is a cliché (or worse). As is Shuker having Ballard’s Lithuanian student nanny moonlighting as a prostitute with Ballard one of her clients. Shuker is playing with – and arguably into – pernicious stereotypes here. As that sage Lloyd Cole once sang, maybe ‘the reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true’. Maybe, maybe not. But a writer of Shuker’s calibre can do better than perpetuate stale prejudices. PoMO and arch with its own fictiveness or not, The Royal Free also exists in a dimension where these things matter.

Elsewhere, a Syrian work colleague is given a tragic but trite back story from his home country, as though ethnicities are only in the novel to demonstrate an associated trait of some sort.

Similarly, I don’t know whether to applaud Shuker’s written rendering of yobs’ and other Londoners’ speech patterns or to hold my head in my hands. It’s always a fine line with cockney. Witness Dick Van Dyke, witness Martin Amis (circa his 2012 novel Lionel Asbo). There’s also a whiff of classism about it. (Likewise the ridgeback as the gang leader’s breed of dog.) This is how Shuker fares – judge for yourself:

Speah some chain sir. Ahm ahngry. Ain’t had nahfing teat.

Or:

Tsa shame uvvah paypul don do va saym fing innit?

Or:

Fahkeen minge. Can’ts. Calm over ear-neck in orlanashnil elf. Dahty fawrin slags.

More Amis than Van Dyke, that last one. The sentence comes during a bus journey that’s like a mini version of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the virtuosic way the trip from north to central London captures so much of the city’s nature from the top floor of a double decker. This is one of many tour-de-force sections in a novel made up more of dazzling but discrete episodes than a plot through-line.

Another section is a more surprising and original aspect of Shuker’s Syrian character: his deep knowledge and love of the upmarket tailors of the city’s Jermyn Street. By extension, one doffs one’s (no doubt expensive and exquisitely crafted) hat to Shuker and his expertise in such sartorial matters. He may, of course, be making some or all of it up as a lampoon, but few of his readers are likely to know better.

One of the dedicatees of The Royal Free is Shuker’s daughter. Ballard’s relationship with his daughter is a highpoint of the novel, with passages that convey the fears and frustrations of fatherhood along with the tender love involved in even a nappy change (including the ‘deep intimacy with her poo’ and ‘the pride that went along that’ – i.e. in the evidence of a healthy diet). The novel is full of pristine passages like this, switching between a literary high style and the rougher rhythms of everyday thought and speech.

Some elements of the novel – and this is by no means a criticism – are as enigmatic as the dog, not least a WTF moment near the end that will leave readers puzzling over what it means long after they’ve finished the book. Their minds might also turn to wondering where Shuker goes next. Another medical world setting in what would then be a trilogy? JG Ballard’s Crash and High-Rise were parts of a trilogy too, the middle of which was his 1974 novel Concrete Island. Perhaps Shuker could work that in too.

Wherever he goes, A Mistake and now The Royal Free show a novelist climbing ever higher as he matches his ability to his ambitions (and vice versa). Who knows what peaks lie ahead?