Toby Litt, one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003, plans to write a book for each letter of the alphabet in turn. His eighth instalment is a vision of hell in an NHS hospital. It’s a concept loaded with darkly comic potential, and the medical mise en scène is the perfect backdrop for Litt’s cast.
All human life is here, and other forms besides: the handsome surgeons and overdosing teenage prostitutes you would find in any hospital-based drama jostle with farmyard animals, Satanists and an escapee from a fetish fantasy called the Rubber Nurse. Hospital life grows increasingly surreal as laws of physics are defied and temples desecrated, and as a security guard explodes. Through this chaos, a nameless boy is trying to get home to his mother before the apple tree growing in his stomach becomes too heavy to carry.
Sadly, Litt’s imagination is let down by his turn of phrase. He plays fun games with the names
of characters, such as the mortuary assistant Dexter von Sinistre.
But the upper-case letters and exclamation marks he uses for emphasis are hackneyed and unsophisticated; and techniques such as dislocating adjectives and sticking them at the end of the sentence make his prose lumpen. Hospital just doesn’t do Litt justice. Roll on the letter “L”.
