On 8 November 2024, we were delighted to gather at Unity Books Wellington to celebrate the launch of Carl Shuker's highly anticipated new novel, The Royal Free, as part of Verb Readers and Writers Festival. The packed bookshop was treated to an excellent playlist curated by Simon Sweetman, and launch speeches from Fergus Barrowman, Damien Wilkins, and Carl himself. 

         

    Carl signing copies of his book

Here is the speech Damien gave to launch The Royal Free:

It’s such a great pleasure to be standing here with Carl’s wonderful, totally engrossing new novel. The Royal Free is another remarkable and remarkably distinctive instalment from the Shuker imagination. He really doesn’t sound like anyone else. And if you’ve only met that imagination, heard that sound through Carl’s last novel, the justly celebrated and recently filmed A Mistake, you’ll have some idea what’s in store for you. The thematic urgency and deep knowledge around the world of medicine is here again though not this time from the clinical side; the same heart-in-your mouth moments of physical peril—Carl is really good at action sequences; the same daring sidebars of specialist knowledge—Carl loves to put the arcane into his books. Indeed there’s a dazzling section here in which a Syrian doctor visits his favourite English tailors, and it’s just this heady indulgence in the weird sexiness of someone considering ties and we learn a lot about shirting. And it made me think how tightly constructed this novel is but that it’s also freewheeling—it can go into unexpected places, you turn the page and you really don’t know how things are going to be.

Anyway, The Royal Free, is certainly not A Mistake 2 or Another Mistake. We’re not in Wellington now, Dr Ropata.

The action takes place in London, told through the eyes of New Zealander James Ballard, and the minute we mention that a novel happens in a great city where the author has lived for a number of years and then left, the temptation is to use the phrase, ‘a love letter’ . . . but I’m not sure that fits here. There’s too much bite and blood on the keyboard. Too much hostile fun at how the English behave, how they sound. How English they are, the poor sods. Voices are such a vivid part of how this book does its work. The mimicry is alarmingly good across classes, across these divides. I love a novel with good ears. And London in this novel is spoken into being as a riven site, a place of cultural refinement, material comfort and plenty and security and also a place of disastrous lack and dispossession and violence—and Carl gets at that with a sort of relish connected to sounding out how people speak, both aloud and in their own minds.

Carl’s London is two-faced, I guess. The first face is the smart, talky, bitchy, literate and even literary office life of the medical journal, The Royal London Journal of Medicine, whose nemesis and competitor is the British Medical Journal, or in the main protagonist’s sweet phrase, ‘the BM motherfucking J’. James Ballard, as I said, is a New Zealander, a mostly disregarded toiler on the journal, with a mind fired up by the hurt and the advantages of his assigned status as an outsider— no one really pays much attention to him, which is perfect and entirely accurate for the Kiwi in a London office— and he’s also dealing with or not dealing with the death of his wife, whose name remains unsaid, marking her as a sacred figure in this fallen world of talkiness.

The other face of London here is the housing estate where James rents and looks after his very young baby. It’s a world of triple locks, and badly lit paths, and dogs of uncertain temperament and loitering young thugs.

This mobility of the telling as we move between these worlds is striking. Reading it, I felt a kind of dizziness or vertigo. And that’s a feeling which is also reinforced by the many ways the text misbehaves on the page. There’s a three-page section which is just a list of the central character’s internet search history and it gathers the power of a poem. James’s baby appears to tell one chapter, which is very funny too. This can be a funny book. And the story is regularly interrupted by entries from the medical journal’s style guide, which is what James is working on. It’s a highly designed text. Of course Carl has never been a novelist who disappears language. As a phrase-maker, he can delight in the high-flown, in the flourish, in the wordiness of words, then he can drop into this kind of brutal register. And The Royal Free can be savoured as a fiction virtuoso’s style guide.

I just want to mention one way this book affected me. You’ll discover your own ways . . . There are two small moments in this novel which have somehow lodged in my solar plexus or wherever fiction lands its punches. The first comes from a scene in which James, this anxious, fearful, grieving father, attends to his baby daughter. Here the writing brings the shock of tenderness into a novel which first appears to have the hard sheen of a comedy of manners about a 38-year-old man, widowed and self-cauterising that wound. In this particular scene, which is just a blink and you miss it moment, James drops his daughter a comic inch back on to the mattress. She’s totally safe. He’s practised enough to have this game with her. It’s a recognisable and lovely moment of shared and private delight between parent and baby.

The second moment happens a bit later, at work . . . James is so in the editing zone, he can look at an A4 page and see the errors without reading the text – he sees it like a ‘freshly painted wall (a hair raised and wavy, a shadow in the enamel’.) Which is a wonderful detail but then he is so into it, he can no longer tolerate a space after a full stop, at the end of a paragraph. You know, if you’ve finished your paragraph and then instead of hit return, you’ve added a space—that’s what drives James mad. Even though that space is of course invisible and meaningless.

Both those moments, I see now, are gaps—meaningless spaces—the air between the baby and her landing zone of the mattress, and the air between the full stop and next paragraph. They’re nothings. But they signify for James, this hurt person, tremendously on-guard against whatever else might arrive in the night to harm him and his daughter. His hyper alertness gives this tense story its terrific emotional weight, since we begin to see how even James’s most recondite side trips into textual matters are helplessly connected to his search for security for his defenceless daughter. You could read the whole book as an extravagant staging of that parental nightmare in which the baby is failed again and again. We’ve lost the baby! Where’s the baby? How can we keep the baby alive? Who gave me this job?

I see the book is dedicated to Anna, and to their first daughter Lotte. Yes! A love letter then not to good old horrible old London but to dear Lotte. Of course I’m reducing this complex narrative to sentiment. Still, what this novel holds on to amid all the entertaining, disquieting office hi-jinks and low-jinks and the small suffering of this excruciating work place, amid the estate violence, and other larger forms of violence including global medical inequities and tragedies, which are here too in the story, what the novel holds on to is the ethical commitment to care.

The James who cares so much about words on the page, he sees the invisible spaces, is in the same frame as the James who foolishly leaves his daughter alone in their apartment when he goes for a run after work, who is then in the same frame as the James who knows enough to offer his daughter that pleasure of the perfectly safe fall onto her mattress cradled by his hands. Finally, the other gap invoked by these gaps is the terrifying one left by his wife’s death. The gap of our incomprehension in the face of pain and loss.

James Ballard—that name—is a nod to J.G. Ballard, one of Carl’s writing heroes, and J.G. also lost his wife. She died of pneumonia while holidaying in Spain. Indeed he credits that out of the blue disaster as prompting him to write differently, since if the world could deliver such an unimaginable blow, then writing should aspire to touch a similar strangeness. I think that’s pretty important to Carl too. Of course you don’t need to know any of that about the other Ballard to feel this novel’s power but reading Carl’s work, there’s always this enlarging sense of worlds and worlds of reference and tribute to film, to books, to music, to other spheres of knowledge, a kind of dialogue. It’s capacious work that wants more and more of the world in it.

The Royal Free, then, is operating on so many levels, which feels like a supreme generosity on Carl’s part—to make an object with this many doors, some flung open, some requiring our own careful working of the handle, some with those sticky locks which take time, some doors with a sleeping baby behind them, some with a torture rack. It’s a haunting, haunted, unsettling achievement and let’s now congratulate and welcome this amazing writer.                          

        

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The Royal Free (paperback, $38) is available at Unity Books, at all other good bookshops, and from our online shop.