Book Review #4 - Working Life
One of the reverberations of this global pandemic has been a change in the way we work. Not for all of us but certainly for some of us. We now work from home, are furloughed, have reduced wages and conduct ourselves somewhat differently. I have had a lot of time to reflect on my working life and what this means to me. My conclusion isn’t profound - I work to live and I’m grateful for having money coming in. My gratitude goes further because I happen to work for a great company, in an interesting field and I do so alongside a workforce that is thoughtful and creative. I will happily talk about the wonderful things that Belmond does and it is easy to do so because beautiful hotels and unique experiences are easy to discuss. There is another post I can write on what I have been doing now that work has slowed down but needless to say it involves marvellous things like reading, walking along the Thames, reconnecting with greenery and sitting on my sun-doused balcony. I have definitely taken the moment and embraced the slow indulgence of a reduced pace. But this post isn't about me or how I fill my awake hours, rather it is about a man called John Sassall.
John Sassall was an English country GP and the subject of John Berger’s A Fortunate Man. If you can find this novel I sincerely suggest you read it. I did so in one sitting. It is several weeks after that compulsive Thursday morning reading session with a filter coffee and early light for company, and I am still trying to formulate what it is I want to say and perhaps feel about this account. In truth I feel a great deal of things. This is a book that pushes inside your head and opens you up. It is searingly honest. It is kind and endearing. It is dark and painful. The writing is without fault. This is a book about the compassion, imagination and generosity that is required in order to be a (perhaps the wrong word) successful doctor.
Berger shadowed Sassall for several weeks in order to write this book about the nature of being a GP. Though in truth the end result is also a meditation on the geography and culture of the community that the doctor serves. So we have vignettes of rural life, the ugly splendour of those living on the edge and the gossipy superiority of the dinner party set. It is - now that I reflect - more like a painting than a documentary in it’s style. These are the hills of poetry more than clinical notes judiciously edited and re-categorised for our viewing pleasure. The end result is a sort of love letter chronicling what it is to be human with our layers of bright ordinariness.
And of course, there is Sassall -
“He confesses to fear without fear. He finds all impulses natural - or understandable. He remembers what it is like to be a child. He has no respect for any title as such. He can enter into other people’s dreams or nightmares. He can lose his temper and then talk about true reasons, as opposed to the excuse, for why he did so. His ability to do such things connects him with aspects of experience which have to be either ignored or denied by common-sense. Thus his ‘licence’ challenges the prisoner in every one of his listeners.”
We see Sassall cry, evenings given over to patients and his relentless drive to attend and not abandon his patients, his community. We experience the victories - the births and the mundane but beautiful moments that pepper our medical lives. Anyone who frequented the same GP I had as a child will see the similarities of Sassell. He is a mischievous, all-knowing, kind and gentle doctor who helps you understand that your suffering is neither unique or unknowable.
Berger will often go off, across those green poetic hills, on tangents. There is a lovely discussion, with us as his silent audience, about how children view time and experience. This spills over onto a more nuanced discussion on loss, memory and pain. He explains, in beautiful prose, the nature and anguish of adult pain, which is experienced through the conviction that what has happened to get us here is absurd or, at best, without sufficient meaning - by which he means our understanding of it does not, cannot, balance our loss.
This is a novel about one man’s working life. And this can be understood in the most true sense, where his life is his work. Sassall is,
“a man pursuing what he wishes to pursue. Sometimes the pursuit involves strain and disappointment, but in itself it is his unique source of satisfaction. Like an artist or like anybody else who believes that his work justifies his life, Sassall...is a fortunate man.”
This, I feel, is a rare thing. It is a thing we often do not find inside our working lives, sometimes we do not find it elsewhere either. A fortunate person, as I see it, combines the Freudian notion of “work and love, that's all there is”. This novel, in its entirety, will show you the depth, and the pain, of this.
Sassall, by the very nature of his position, is knitted to the people, culture and place he works. His daily life mirrors & is created by the small world around him. I have wondered whether our current forced return to the local will continue past this moment. I have certainly experienced a very different sense of geography since coronavirus. I now see the place I live with a frequency that is new and very absorbing. I have walked through new streets and found the hidden silent corners that snake around my home. I have watched, spied and intruded on the people I live amongst. I now see the ordinary mechanics of modern life, or rather the ordinary life of the people in Deptford. And it is truly wonderful.
