Hospital [Paperback]

Toby Litt's 'Hospital' is a mesmerising read. It begins like a comic mix of fairytale meets Mills & Boon, with its child protagonist running around Hospital - the author's emphasis is upon Hospital (an entity in its own right), not just a hospital (as in a building where sick people are taken) - worried about an apple seed in his stomach that is rapidly maturing into an apple tree, whilst all around him innocent nurses are swooning for hunky surgeons. But underneath all the superficial gloss, something darker is lurking, from a Black Mass in the hospital chapel, a voodoo ceremony taking place in the basement and immortality severely affecting various patients and inmates around the building (making the sick get better and bringing the dead back to life including, in one disturbingly macabre scene, the jars stored in Hospital's teaching wing...).

As a read, 'Hospital' is hypnotising and, for myself personally, one of those books that you find yourself going 'OK, I'll just read a couple more paragraphs...' and then realising that it's 2 hours later.

I also had the great pleasure in meeting Toby Litt recently when he came to perform a reading and Q & A session at my university; not only is he incredibly entertaining as a writer, he is also a remarkably adept storyteller in person and a thoroughly nice guy to boot! Check out his website at tobylitt.com.

Nothing can prepare you for the psychotropic mayhem that Toby Litt unleashes in Hospital for you. In fact in hyper-intellectualising the fiendish fantastical action that unfolds here too much is spoiling the fun. With all the freedom that this sub-genre of "coma" fiction gives him, we have Litt going full throttle at making the multi-storeyed institution of the sick come alive with so much well-being and life (of botanical and otherwise) after a Black Mass and a voodoo procession go horribly wrong (or right depending where you stand on these things) inside the annals of the building which presumably resides inside the annals of the subconscious of a subarachnoid-haemorrhage-recovering patient (who, just to make matters that much more icky is a key subject within his own vivid "dream vision"), that it will leave you gasping for breath and go "no kidding", besides the occassional laughter-roll.

The MAIN guy has-and this is strictly one of my many takes-during his coma, listened and taken a liking to a fairy tale about apple trees and a disobeying boy, and maybe because he's one of the insiders, the full blown fantasy that he subsequently conjures up has, besides a spectacularly detailed and architecturally coherent vision of the building, a wanton boy with an apple-seed tree sprouting from the navel running through never-ending corridors and elusively far-far-away main exits, even as the hospital gets surrounded by a fog of all-encompassing death fog. Much of the action in the main act relies on how gobsmacked you can be of sick and dead people getting whole and alive again, and how big a stomach you have for gratuitous violence on the written page. This is Grindhouse movies meeting Dean Koontz via nauseating amount of afternoon medical soaps and handshaking with Jose Saramago. But it's all popcorn. Not working in totality as some sort of a serious allegory, it definitely throws a few punches at those who spend a majority of their time bellowing at the sky for the Almighty to shower well-being. Well, read Hospital to find out what happens when there's abundance of perfect health. With the cynicism of Saramago, Litt unfolds an apocalypse that's so irredeemable it is scary, and yet you don't get down as you have Litt writing it.

It's peopled by atleast a 100 odd characters, the action takes place over 20 floors, and yet, like a master-juggler at a circus, Litt manages to make 100 totally convincing, disparate beings with absolutely believable dialogue and by slicing the epic action into four different vantages and by cutting to each of these four narratives in quick alternation, he makes sure the pages fly by even as sometimes his ideas play catch-up for an odd 50 or so. The moody 200 page prologue which builds up the tension and the atmosphere totally achieves a nail-biting cliff-hanger after a quick succession of revelations and a promise of the fleeting connections hiding something deeper. And it does. The apocalyptic chaos that ensues within the building and the sheer scale of devastation and orgiastic flesh-and-blood abundance the creatures find themselves and throw each other into, not forgetting the waging of a religious war of sorts is something that in hands of other sci-fi/speculative fiction heavyweights, would have led to a different sort of an examination. But not with Litt. He just fires on all the engines and delivers hedonistic pulp with very few sombre philosophical deviations (although for those embarking upon reading this, noting down the strange reverence he pays for the psychological growth of his humanoids who become gifted with rather erratic physical gifts is rewarding-the guy even at his wildest knows how and where to anchor it somehow).

The tone makes Hospital slightly vapid and disposable, but lazy this ain't. I found Litt's imagination fierce, his prose unlaboured, his humour pitch-perfect (and so welcome), his research sincere (anybody who's worked or been in any of the NHS hospitals is in for a whale of a time) and his genre-tripping between daytime soap (the hospital politics!) fantasy, science-fiction and speculative horror totally effortless. It's not for everyone but if flipping through the first few pages gets you sucked in, you won't be disappointed.

Erm? [scratches head]

Ummm? [taps lips pensively]

Hmm? [frowns perplexedly]

I have no idea what this book is about, or what its author intended, if anything. Is it a metaphor for the futility of the ancient battle between good and evil, with Hospital being the indifferent and all powerful universe? Is it a surreal updating of Dante's journey through hell?
Is it just great fun?

Whatever symbolism is hidden in it (or none), this outrageously surreal and compelling book is brilliant.

I absolutely loved it.