Sickness and Health

This expansive, sometimes droll novel chronicles the various commitments to medicine of two generations of physicians at a prestigious Edinburgh teaching hospital. It begins in the late 1940s with the WW II generation, whose combination of idealism and pragmatism helped create Great Britain's National Health Service; then it moves on to focus primarily on a handful of medical students in the class of 1969. Some of these young people fulfill their dreams and ambitions; others adjust to the reality of the obstacles in their paths or the social circumstances that limit their success; a few fail. Douglas ( The Houseman's Tale ) displays a keen eye for the working conditions within the Scottish medical community (still an old-boys' network) and a wonderful ear for natural dialogue. Yet he fails to elicit much empathy for his characters, whose motives are often merely sketched as the overly long narrative rushes forward in its attempt to cover too much ground. The pessimistic, cynical ending shows the characters, and even the hospital itself, weighed down by the bleak zeitgeist of the age of Thatcherism and AIDS. ( Nov. )