One easy mistake

Dissection was recently launched by Helen Garner, who described it as a novel like no other she had read. This impressive first novel is indeed astonishingly polished. Like Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), it dissects morally complex issues of life and death with a deceptively simple touch, using telling domestic detail to bring its characters and settings vividly to life on the page. The prose is clean, crisp, precise; as if carved by a scalpel. It might be the instinctual approach of a writer used to dealing with weighty issues in succinct fifteen-minute blocks.

Jacinta Halloran is a Melbourne general practitioner, and she writes about one here. Dr Anna McBride’s life is crumbling under the weight of an innocent but costly mistake. She failed to diagnose a rare cancer in a seventeen-year-old patient, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Now she is being sued for negligence; the case has dragged on for three years. Meanwhile, her every utterance to patients is first sifted through an exhausting internal filter, to ensure that she protects herself – particularly exhausting because her natural instinct (and training) has always led her to consider her patients’ interests first. Her ongoing conversation with herself puts her at a remove from the rest of the world, even her loved ones, creating a kind of invisible force field that she must push through. Everything is coloured by this internal filter – her private language of fault and neglect, disclosure and exposure. This language of lawyers has seeped into her everyday life, infecting not only her consultations with patients but her behaviour at home. (Noticing that her husband Paul’s hair is thinning at the crown, she ponders whether it’s her ‘duty of disclosure’ to tell him, in case he wants to consider early treatment.)