Some Tests

It was while sitting in a waiting room with a family member currently going through “some tests” that I read a publicity piece about this novel. I wasn’t sure if it was an unsettling form of serendipity but I ordered it from my local library anyway.
 
Beth Own is an ordinary woman who is just living a normal family life in Melbourne. She has a job in aged care, an accountant husband David and two children. One day she wakes up feeling vaguely unwell and David calls in a locum who sends her off for some tests.
 
The first part of the novel seems almost conventional with Beth being seen, tested and then referred to another specialist, then another and yet another. Then the pace picks up with squeezed-in appointments all over the place. Without transport of her own and a husband too busy to accompany her, she must travel on trains and buses and the destinations move from the strips of city medical centres at Box Hill further and further away to bleak industrial areas on the edges of farmland and soulless new suburbia near Epping. She has to stay overnight in one clinic and is given new clothes with yet another destination the following day, including to a massive pharmacy complex. Along her journey she encounters others clutching referrals for further tests, all set on similar but criss-crossing routes. In the process Beth becomes more compliant in her dislocation from her family and not getting any direct answers and just lets those in charge direct her.
 
It is soon apparent that this novel is a fantastical exploration of the road many of us now take towards our own ends, an allegory on the extensive medical interference, false optimism and denial that goes on and the hope that science will provide some test that might save us from the inevitable.
 
Bleak, bizarre, fantastical - but with occasional flashes of dark humour - this is not a novel I’d recommend to anyone currently going through serious “tests” for any reason, but it is memorable if only to warn us that unless we get a direct passage home via a bolt from the blue, this reflects the route the majority of us are likely to take.
 
(Follow this link for an interview with the author.)


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Amazon.co.uk
 

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