DOCTORS AND NURSES
by Lucy Ellman
Bloomsbury, £12; 224pp
THE HEROINES OF Lucy Ellman’s macabre romances tend to be misshapen and marginalised and Jen, the enormous, angry nurse at the centre of Doctors and Nurses, is no exception. Except that her obsession, and the recurring theme of the novel, is her body. Specifically, “two bulbocavernous muscles, a fossa navicularis, a levator ani muscle and a portio vaginalis uteri”. Ellman’s rampant passion for noirish body politics has reached fever pitch with this, her fifth novel.
We join Jen as she is going over all the things she hates about the world while looking for a new job. When she finds one — assisting the gorgeous GP Dr Lewis in his village practice — it leads to all the prescription drugs, medical sex-games and murderous intrigue that she could hope for (like Jen, her new boss, soon to be her lover, seems to lose an awful lot of patients). But will their psychopathic tendencies let them live happily ever after? And will Ellman’s stylistic shenanigans give us all migraines before we find out? Lists of objects and illnesses go on for pages; about one word in 50 is capitalised; every instance of the word corridor is followed by a number in brackets, so we can keep tabs on how often it is used. Weirdness for weirdness’s sake? So it seems, for these tics are never contextualised.
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Many books these days feature the c-word, but Ellman is up for tackling the bigger taboo of describing the thing: smelling it, loving it, the things that happen to it and the things it can do. She even gives us a photograph of one.
Whether or not you will like this depends on many things, one being whether you were fooled by the sexy little jacket image of a thin woman’s legs in fishnets and a handbag dripping blood. And if you’re a woman, was your feminist sensibility honed squatting over hand mirrors with The Female Eunuch close at hand, or matching your male friends pint for pint then working it all off in the gym? Old-school gynaecentricity masquerading as chick-lit noir might be a bit too rich for some, but if you want to see the men in your reading group squirm in disgusted arousal, as no doubt would our Jen, then this surreal romp could be just what the doctor ordered.