One In Three

AEJ (Tony) Fitchett - 14 Nov, 2024

‘One In Three’, Mira Harrison, The Book Guild, 2024, ISBN 978 1835740 811.
Review by AEJ Fitchett, MBChB, DipObst, FRNZCGP [Dist], retired GP & GP Obstetrician

“You can’t outrun the shadows of your past” it says on the front cover, above the author’s name and the title of Mira Harrison’s debut novel, “One In Three”.
The book’s title refers to the punishing roster experienced by James Hartman, a newly qualified doctor working as a junior house surgeon in an NHS hospital in 1989. At the opening of the novel, after more than 60 hours on continuous weekend duty without being able to shower or change his clothes, and with still more to come, he is struggling to cope with patient deaths and the possibility that he may have contributed to one, and seeks relief, unsuccessfully, with a brief visit to a prostitute.
The novel follows James as he works in hospitals in Southampton and Portsmouth, under consultants who range from highly skilled and encouraging to an incompetent, lazy, sexist and abusive bully. At the second he meets and works with a female senior surgical registrar from New Zealand who is both capable and supportive, and with whom a personal relationship develops.
Mira writes from personal experience as a house surgeon in these hospitals in 1989 and 1990, and for this reviewer, who worked in a New Zealand hospital as House Surgeon, SHO, and Registrar for nearly three years in the early 1970s, the authenticity of the writing is obvious and deeply felt. But as with Mira’s two books of hospital-based short stories, “Admissions” and “New Admissions”, the reality of both the settings, and the emotions and behaviour of the characters, will engage all readers, not just those with personal experience of such environments and the associated stresses.
The novel describes difficult issues, but one comes away from it with positive feelings
James can’t escape the shadows of his past, and the mistakes he has made, but, with support from a variety of others, ranging from those he works with to an elderly patient who eventually dies in hospital, he faces up to them and addresses them responsibly. At the end of the novel, as he and Ainslie kiss and weep together in the hospital’s non-denominational chapel after playing an arrangement of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” together, one is left with the feeling that these two doctors, struggling to do their best in situations that seem, at times, to be unmanageable, are symbols of the hopes of humanity.
Read “One In Three” – it’s brilliant!

Janet - 14 Nov, 2024

Just read this book at the weekend and I absolutely loved it!