Not The Life Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

 

There are portents from the outset that Not the Life Imagined, a story about a group of medical students in the 1960s and 1970s, is not going to be your classic comic tale of medical misadventures and ineptitude, with James Robertson Justice BELLOWING across every scene at the “blathering idiots” under his charge. We are told, right from the start:

When did you last see a physician or surgeon? Were they charming, knowledgeable, reassuring and trustworthy? Are you sure? I’ve known some who are not as they seem. They had other agendas. One is dead and the other awaits his fate, just like me.

It is clear, then, that there is going to be darkness in this novel. And yet it is a richly humorous story, and medical misadventures and ineptitude abound. But these escapades are not, as with Richard Gordon or the like, the point of the novel, but its backdrop. We are in a much more realistic world and, as the novel unfolds, its loosely connected moments gradually coalesce to form something darker and deeper.

Most of the novel is told through the eyes of Beth Slater, and it is Beth who provides the novel’s moral compass. She is one of a group of students who arrive at Glasgow University to study medicine in 1967, a working class girl, naive and principled. Her classmates are a diverse bunch, all of them flawed in the way every human is. Over the course of the twenty or so years encompassed by the novel these flaws are itemised and probed and, if not exactly judged, then certainly exposed to critical scrutiny. And with each moral failing, each moment of weakness, each capitulation to greed or fear or plain desperation, the characters become more human, more like us, more like a mirror in which we can see our own flaws and frailties.

Not the Life Imagined is part bildungsroman, part crime thriller, part psychological character study, part comedy, part feminist admonition, part history of the NHS. Each of the characters arrives at university hopeful and ambitious, with ideas about how their lives will unfold. Life, of course, has its own trajectory and anyone who thinks they are in control of their own destiny is closing their eyes to reality. The reality, in Not the Life Imagined, is sometimes tragic, often traumatic, frequently amusing, but always compelling.