Review
Filling the gap left by All Creatures Great and Small, with aplomb, says Ben MacNair.
- An Irish Country Doctor
- Brandon Books
An Irish Country Doctor
Patrick Taylor’s An Irish Country Doctor is the literary equivalent of a pillow, the literary marshmallow. It is reliable and comforting, full of the types of stories and characters that make memoirs of this type so popular.
It looks at the life of Barry Laverty, a newly qualified doctor and his life in Ballybucklebo with Dr Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. The new doctor is definitely green and has much to lean about country life and how being a country doctor is about more than the knowledge that he learned in medical school. The lively characters and their stories are bought to vivid life in the novel, with its strong dialogue, for which Patrick Taylor obviously has a very good ear.
Although it is not directly about him, there are clearly a lot of elements of autobiography within the book. He has taken on the mantle of such other writers as James Herriot by letting the characters and stories act as the plot, rather than forcing them to fit some sort of narrative arc.
As well as looking at the medical aspects of a doctor’s life, the approach of Dr O’Reilly looks at curing the whole patient, rather than just looking at what ails them. He looks at their financial, social and matrimonial problems as much as he looks at their illnesses and ailments. At first Barry Laverty is disturbed by O’Reilly’s seeming lack of regard for the social niceties, not to mention medical protocol, until he realises what he can learn from the old doctor, not just professionally, but also in terms of love and life.
The book was a bestseller in the United States, and is Patrick Taylor’s fourth full length novel.
A sequel to this book, An Irish Country Village will also soon be published by Brandon Books.
