FICTION
‘The Resurrectionist’
Matthew Guinn
W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95, 304 pages
Matthew Guinn appears at the Decatur Book Festival, 4:15 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Decatur Library Stage. www.decaturbookfestival.com
“First, do no harm.” Despite popular misconceptions, the famous phrase doesn’t appear in the Hippocratic Oath. The ancient pledge does bar doctors from divulging the so-called “holy secrets” that emerge in their work — and as Matthew Guinn uncovers in “The Resurrectionist,” the unholy ones as well. The grisly historical thriller shows that many of our sacred notions about the medical vocation may be misconstrued, or at least convenient cases of amnesia regarding the harmful charlatanry that was common before 20th century reforms.
If early descriptions of bloodletting and blistering (techniques doctors once believed indispensable) don’t scare off the squeamish, graphic flashes of bone-saw amputations and formaldehyde storage tanks should finish the job. Most disturbing of all, a closing note reveals that the plot — including grave robberies condoned for classroom research — echoes actual events in Southern medical schools.
“The Resurrectionist” operates almost as two separate novels, both set at the fictional South Carolina Medical College in Columbia. Chapters alternate between a contemporary institutional cover-up story and a far more engrossing gothic yarn in the 1860s.
Jacob Thacker, the former storyline’s flaccid protagonist, begins the book as a man in limbo. His addiction to Xanax has led to a probation from his medical residency and a lackey job managing the school’s public relations, what he calls “the dirty work that keeps the machine running.”
The assignment gets dirtier when workers unearth the bones of dozens of African-American slaves in the basement of an old classroom building. The college’s heavy-handed dean orders Jacob to hide the discovery, fearing a firestorm from the black community and a death sentence for his capital campaign.
Meanwhile in 1857, founders of the school face an equally morbid quandary: a shortage of corpses has left desperate instructors skinning goats in anatomy class. After considering “the Scottish way” (Edinburgh medical students had to supply their own cadavers), the board agrees to invest in a “resurrectionist,” a slave who will discretely plunder nearby cemeteries.
Here, finally, the narrative comes to life. Breaking the tedium of Jacob’s chit-chats with faculty, the flashback chapters coalesce around the beguiling, often malicious title character. The relocated slave gives himself a new name: “Nemo,” which means “no man.” Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo didn’t appear until 1870, so the reader must accept that he has been blessed with Latin lessons. Then again, if a hunter kidnapped from Senegal can go from plantation deer poacher to butler, body snatcher to paid college, maybe anything is possible.
Nemo’s chilling late-night episodes digging up graves and “dancing” on the disturbed soil to mask his handiwork illuminate a character keenly aware of his repugnant predicament: “A slave, he knew, was either a creature of adaptation or just another dead body.” This intense survival instinct gets tangled up with more sinister tendencies. Nemo relishes his dark reputation as being in cahoots with the devil and oozes vicious pleasure in frightening nosy neighbors by rattling off fake hexes.
His ingenuity for revenge makes the notorious chocolate pie from Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” sound scrumptious by comparison. When a belligerent Confederate soldier demands booze at a rowdy secession ball, Nemo smilingly delivers a cup from his “special” barrel. Another horrifying incident of vengeance (this one involving a corpse, a handkerchief and a hysterectomy) gives the Civil War chapters a gruesome, if not entirely fulfilling, climax.
After spending nights with the devious yet empathetic body snatcher, the novel’s inevitable appointments in the present day tend to drag. Erratic Jacob seems always to be driving around town in an endless pre-dawn loop, pondering his next ethical hiccup. It’s difficult to see the character making it as either a physician or a publicist. He manages the school’s public-relations powder keg with the urgency of a truck-stop waitress. Several head-scratching passages of stilted dialogue only further delay the inevitable explosion.
Guinn, an Atlanta native with a foot-long list of academic credentials, previously published a textbook exploring class distinctions among Southern writers such as Barry Hannah and Dorothy Allison. His scholarly skills no doubt came in handy when researching the novel’s obscure, often absorbing medical trivia.
In the flashbacks, Guinn resuscitates antiquated lingo (“daguerreotype,” “phaeton,” “laudanum”) with the loving care of an English professor. Similarly, he displays assurance in allocating the story’s gothic elements, a gift perhaps learned from his former boss, “Deliverance” author James Dickey.
Such a literary bloodline makes the novel’s garish appetite for stomach-turning details — buckets of blood, splattering cadaver juices — even more troublesome. The book seems primed to examine its heaps of obvious dualities (black vs. white, freedom vs. slavery, the living vs. the dead), but like the inert Jacob, it never lingers on one issue long enough to render a diagnosis.
Owing to its macabre, real-life roots, “The Resurrectionist” exposes some of medicine’s more disturbing tendencies. Though the present-day chapters sometimes suffer from formulaic plotting, the enigmatic body thief Nemo elevates the pulse rate on this haunted history lesson.
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