The year is 1949 and a brave new world has just been born: Aneurin Bevan’s newly formed NHS is opening its doors to patients, no matter their social class, and it is this moment in contemporary history that provides the backdrop for Linda Grant’s hugely entertaining seventh novel, The Dark Circle.
It is four years since the war and “everything is short, soap is short, joy is short, sex is short, and no one on the street is laughing so jokes must be short too”. When East End Jewish boy Lenny Lynskey and his twin sister, Miriam, contract tuberculosis, the two 18-year-olds are swiftly dispatched to a sanatorium, the Gwendo, in the Kent countryside. Formerly a private hospital, the Gwendo’s patients had traditionally been “middle class or better” but now “new arrivals were starting to turn up, types with bad table manners and no taste for the genteel facilities the Gwendo offered its languid inmates: bridge tournaments, flower arranging, golf for the fitter ones”.
The Gwendo is a social melting pot, in which people from across the class spectrum are trapped together with no chance of escape, allowing Grant a prism through which to view the social, political and cultural mores of the period. A diverse and engaging cast of characters populate the hospital: ineffectual medical director Dr Limb is infatuated with one of his patients; the matron makes no attempt to disguise her disdain for her working-class wards – “it seemed to her there had been a sudden collapse of order while she was in another room”; widowed art teacher Mrs Kitson is “entirely middle-aged now, thirty-four!” and enjoys extracurricular sexual activity with the more healthy inmates. Lenny and Miriam soon befriend two of the sanatorium’s private patients – 22-year-old Valerie and German refugee Hannah – both of whom are suffering under the hospital’s strict regime. With the arrival of American patient Arthur Pesky, the hierarchical obedience of the sanatorium is disrupted and the unlikely group of friends begins to challenge medical authority.
The Dark Circle is a fascinating portrayal of the authoritarianism inherent in postwar British healthcare. Some of the treatments are both brutal and unproved, yet there is a dictatorial assumption that doctors’ orders should never be questioned. When Lenny and Arthur discover an entire floor populated by children on whom radical new treatments are tested and who are isolated from their families – “the boredom was so intense some of the children had to be tied down” – their natural horror is met with autocratic disdain.
Despite its historical setting, Grant’s novel is shot through with contemporary relevance. The TB patients are anxiously awaiting the arrival of streptomycin, the new wonder drug that could cure them all, but the NHS can afford to provide it only to a chosen few. Lenny and Miriam face antisemitism from all quarters: “Who on earth was that hairy Jewish gorilla? Was he bothering you? We can put in a complaint, you know.” The early stirrings of feminism cause women to question themselves – “maternal rousings in a girl were the enemy within, a fifth column of treacherous emotions” – while Grant engages with themes of lesbianism, the power of education and corrupt MPs.
Occasionally, the novel wears its social history too conspicuously on its sleeve: references to the early years of TV, issues with the middle classes, housing developments and debates about the NHS can at times feel pointed and do not fit entirely seamlessly with the narrative.
But The Dark Circle is nonetheless a revealing insight: both funny and illuminating, it is a novel about what it means to treat people well, medically, emotionally and politically.
The Dark Circle is published by Virago (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93
