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THE GOOD DOCTOR

by Damon Galgut ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2004

Carefully, admirably crafted but, overall, unaffecting.

One of six finalists for the ManBooker 2003, originally scheduled to appear here in March 2004, but pushed forward: a highly accomplished but unmemorable post-apartheid story in which a young doctor’s best intentions end badly.

Set in a poor and remote part of South Africa that was formerly one of the notorious “homelands,” the tale is narrated by Frank Eloff, a doctor at a small and underused hospital. Frank is like the protagonists of so many stories about anomie and alienation, and the similarity makes the novel, despite its setting, more an intellectual cliché than an original. The hospital is headed by Dr. Ruth Ngema, who, having been promised a better posting, doesn’t want to jeopardize her chances by forcing improvements. Which means that there’s no response when thieves steal plumbing fixtures, and beds and buildings deteriorate. Frank, there because his wife ran off with his best friend and medical partner, takes a masochistic pleasure in living in this remote hellhole, where even the nearest town is dying. He also has a black mistress, Maria, who runs a dilapidated craft stall on the main road and is curiously reticent about the husband she claims to have. Accustomed to the tedium, Frank isn’t happy when he learns he’ll be sharing his room with newcomer Laurence Waters, a young doctor come to perform a year of community service. Laurence, an idealist bent on doing well, soon convinces Dr. Ngema, but not Frank, whose own ideals were lost while serving in the apartheid army, to set up clinics in the villages. The clinics are a huge success, but good intentions can’t compete with the realities of crime and corruption as the army arrives and sets up camp in the town. The soldiers are ostensibly there to track drug dealers, check corruption, and patrol the border for illegal crossings, but their activities seem increasingly more malevolent. A hospital worker is mysteriously wounded and nearly dies, and, on a night when Laurence is on duty, both he and his patient are abducted. Frank, too, soon finds his life dramatically changing.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004

ISBN: 0-8021-1764-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Damon Galgut

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

More by Robert Harris

by Robert Harris

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The Good Doctor: A Novel Paperback – September 7, 2004

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 224 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Grove Press
• Publication date September 7, 2004
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.25 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0802141692
• ISBN-13 978-0802141699
• See all details

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From the back cover, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., the good doctor, grove press, chapter one.

The first time I saw him I thought, he won’t last. I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon and he appeared suddenly in the doorway, carrying a suitcase in one hand and wearing plain clothes – jeans and a brown shirt – with his white coat on top. He looked young and lost and a bit bewildered, but that wasn’t why I thought what I did. It was because of something else, something I could see in his face. He said, ‘Hello…? Is this the hospital?’ His voice was unexpectedly deep for somebody so tall and thin. ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Put down your bag.’ He came in, but he didn’t put down the bag. He held it close while he looked around at the pink walls, the empty chairs, the dusty desk in the corner, the frail plants wilting in their pots. I could see that he thought there’d been some kind of mistake. I felt sorry for him. ‘I’m Frank Eloff,’ I said. ‘I’m Laurence Waters.’ ‘I know.’ ‘You know...?’ He seemed amazed that we should be expecting him, though he’d been sending faxes for days already, announcing his arrival. ‘We’re sharing a room,’ I told him. ‘Let me take you over.’ The room was in a separate wing. We had to cross an open space of ground, close to the parking lot. When he came in he must have walked this way, but now he looked at the path through the long grass, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves, as if he’d never seen them before. We went down the long passage to the room. I’d lived and slept alone in here until today. Two beds, a cupboard, a small carpet, a print on one wall, a mirror, a green sofa, a low coffee table made of synthetic wood, a lamp. It was all basic standard issue. The few occupied rooms all looked the same, as in some featureless bleak hotel. The only trace of individuality was in the configuration of the furniture, but I’d never bothered to shift mine around till two days ago, when an extra bed had been brought in. I also hadn’t added anything. There was no personality in the ugly, austere furniture; against this neutral backdrop, even a piece of cloth would have been revealing. ‘You can take that bed,’ I said. ‘There’s space in the cupboard. The bathroom’s through that door.’ ‘Oh. Yes. Okay.’ But he still didn’t put down his bag. I’d only heard two weeks before that I would have to share a room. Dr Ngema had called me in. I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t refuse. And in the days that followed I came around, in spite of myself, to the idea of sharing. It might not be so bad. We might get on well, it might be good to have company, my life here could be pleasantly different. So in a way I started looking forward with curiosity to this change. And before he arrived I did a few things to make him welcome. I put the new bed under the window and made it up with fresh linen. I cleared a few shelves in the cupboard. I swept and cleaned, which is something I don’t do very often. But room was ugly and bare. And Laurence Waters didn’t look to me like the person I’d pictured in my head. I now that he was standing here I could see, through his eyes, how invisible that effort was. The don’t know what I’d imagined, but it wasn’t this bland, biscuit-coloured young man, almost a boy still, who was at last putting his suitcase down. He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his sleeve. He put them on again and said wearily, ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘What?’ ‘This whole place.’ ‘The hospital?’ ‘Not just the hospital. I mean...’ He waved a hand to indicate the world out there. He meant the town outside the hospital walls. ‘You asked to come here.’ ‘But I didn’t know that it would be like this. Why?’ he said with sudden intensity. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘We can talk about it later. But I’m on duty now, I have to go back to the office.’ ‘I must see Dr Ngema,’ he said abruptly. ‘She’s expecting me.’ ‘Don’t worry about that now. You can do it in the morning. No hurry.’ ‘What should I do now?’ ‘Whatever you like. Unpack, settle in. Or come and sit with me. I’ll be finished in a couple of hours.’ I left him alone and went back. He was shocked and depressed. I understood that; I’d felt it myself when I first arrived. You came expecting one thing and were met by something else completely. You came expecting a busy modern hospital – rural maybe, and small, but full of activity – in a town where things were happening. This was the capital of what used to be one of the homelands, so whatever the morality of the politics that gave rise to it, you expected a place full of administration and movement, people coming and going. And when you’d turned off the main route to the border and were coming in on the one minor road that led here, it might still look – when you saw the place from a distance – like what you’d expected. There was the main street, leading to the centre where the fountain and the statue stood, the shop-fronts and pavements and streetlights, and all the buildings beyond. It looked neat and calibrated and exact. Not a bad place to be. And then you arrived and you saw. Maybe the first clue was a disturbing detail; a crack that ran through an otherwise pristine wall, or a set of broken windows in an office you passed. Or the fact that the fountain was dry and full of old sand at the bottom. And you slowed down, looking around you with vague anxiety, and suddenly it all came into clear focus. The weeds in the joints of the pavements and bricks, the grass growing at places in the street, the fused lamps and the empty shops behind their blank glass fronts and the mildew and damp and blistered paint and the marks of rain on every surface and the slow tumbling down of solid structures, sometimes grain by grain, sometimes in pieces. And you were not sure any more of where you were. And there were no people. That was the last thing you noticed, though you realized then that it was the first thing to give you that uneasy hollow feeling: the place was deserted. There was, yes, a car cruising slowly down a back road, an official uniform or two ambling along a pavement, and maybe a figure slouching on a footpath through an overgrown plot of land, but mostly the space was empty. Uninhabited. No human chaos, no movement. A ghost town. ‘It’s like something terrible happened here,’ Laurence said. ‘That’s how it feels.’ ‘ Ja , but the opposite is true. Nothing has ever happened here. Nothing ever will. That’s the problem.’

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; Reprint edition (September 7, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802141692
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802141699
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.25 x 8.25 inches
• #95 in African Literature (Books)
• #4,765 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #26,040 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Damon galgut.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

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Customers find the writing brilliant, beautiful, and taut. They describe the book as interesting, great, and enjoyable. Readers also appreciate the excellent character development. Opinions are mixed on the plot, with some finding it compelling and original, while others say it makes them feel anxious and unsettled.

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Customers find the writing brilliant, beautiful, and pleasant. They describe the book as an easy, short, and taut read. Readers also mention the author is talented.

"...The writing and content is powerful , packed with haunting images and searing content. On one level, it could be read as a thriller, taut and humid...." Read more

"His writing is powerful and beautiful. But I found that reading this novel made me feel anxious and unsettled in a way that is difficult to describe...." Read more

"It was truly a pleasure reading Galgut's well written book which, while it was not exactly a page turner, I eagerly finished in two days...." Read more

"It's an easy read , though rather slow and uneventful. The author doesn't evoke any feeling in the reader except for melancholy." Read more

Customers find the book interesting, remarkable, and enjoyable. They also describe it as a powerful, beautifully written, and real page-turner.

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Customers find the character development excellent.

"... Great characters which I could easily picture. Think this would be good for a book club." Read more

"A beautifully crafted novel. Excellent character development with a subtle depiction of current life in South Africa with clear reference to the..." Read more

"... Interesting character developments and interaction within a thin storyline. Enjoyed the read written with a very pleasant literary feel." Read more

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"...The writing and content is powerful, packed with haunting images and searing content. On one level, it could be read as a thriller, taut and humid...." Read more

"His writing is powerful and beautiful . But I found that reading this novel made me feel anxious and unsettled in a way that is difficult to describe...." Read more

"...Excellent character development with a subtle depiction of current life in South Africa with clear reference to the societal differences and the..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the plot. Some mention it's compelling all the way through, original, and honest. However, others say it makes them feel anxious and unsettled.

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"...writing and content is powerful, packed with haunting images and searing content . On one level, it could be read as a thriller, taut and humid...." Read more

"...Read it, it's a very good story , and decide for yourself who "the good doctor" actually was." Read more

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Reading Matters

Book reviews of mainly modern & contemporary fiction

‘The Good Doctor’ by Damon Galgut

Fiction – Kindle edition; Atlantic Books; 216 pages; 2011.

The end of the year might be four months off, but  The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut   is certainly going to be on my list of favourite reads for 2015. I read it over the course of a couple of days, but every time I put the book down, I kept thinking about it, and now, a fortnight later, the characters and the story still remain with me — the sign of an exceptionally good novel.

Two doctors, two room-mates

First published in 2003, The Good Doctor  is set in the “new” post-apartheid South Africa. It tells the story of Frank Eloff, a staff doctor working in a deserted rural hospital, who is forced to share his room with a blow-in: a younger doctor, Laurence Waters, who is newly qualified, green behind the years and brimming with energy and new ideas.

From the very start, Frank, who narrates the story in a cool yet forthright manner, is unhappy about Laurence’s arrival:

When he said, ‘I would never do that to you,’ he was telling me that he was a true friend. I think he felt that way almost from the first day. Yet the feeling wasn’t mutual. He was a room-mate to me, a temporary presence who was disturbing my life.

But despite Frank’s best efforts not to become too close to his new colleague, he finds himself drawn into Laurence’s orbit. Yet Frank has secrets he wishes to keep — an affair with a black woman living outside the village, for instance, and a troubled past in the army — which makes it difficult for him to truly open up to the man everyone thinks is his best friend. This creates a narrative tension, a kind of suspenseful atmosphere, that builds throughout the story.

This is aided by the sudden arrival in the village of a group of soldiers and an Army General — from Frank’s dark past — who are on the trail of a self-made dictator from the apartheid era rumoured to be living nearby.

Compelling portrait

But, to be honest, there’s not much of a plot. The book works on the basis of simple yet effortless writing, which makes for an effortless, almost dream-like read — the closest thing to floating on clouds — and a compelling portrait of two men and the friendship that develops between them over time.

It’s also an intriguing look at what happens to people living in isolated communities, where relationships between people can become strained and oppressive because they are living in such close proximity to one another: privacy is non-existent, which might go some way to explaining Frank’s fierce protection of what little private life he does have.

Essentially, the two doctors could be seen to be a metaphor for “old” and “new” South Africa: Frank is set in his ways, a loner, comfortable in his own skin, who resents change; while Laurence is idealistic, passionate and eager to take on new responsibilities in order to prove himself. Neither is unlikable but they are poles apart — in so many different ways.

I looked at him, but I didn’t see him. I was seeing something else. A picture had come to me, and it was of Laurence and me as two strands in a rope. We were twined together in a tension that united us; we were different to each other, though it was in our nature to be joined and woven in this way. As for the points that we were spanned between — a rope doesn’t know what its own purpose is.

This is a dramatic story about guilt and honour, loyalty and friendship, politics and fear — and probably the best book I’ve read all summer.

The Good Doctor won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book from the Africa region and was shortlisted for both the 2003 Man Booker Prize and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

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I am a book obsessive who has been charting my reading life online since the early 2000s. View all posts by kimbofo

28 thoughts on “‘The Good Doctor’ by Damon Galgut”

So glad you liked this. Knowing you like Petterson, I think you will find some similarities in Galgut’s work. They are my two favourite contemporary writers. Both work best with the unspoken nuances of the tensions between people. I have read almost all of Galgut’s novels, mostly before my relatively recent entrance into book blogging, and had the opportunity to meet him last fall when he was at our word festival. I would highly recommend The Impostor and In a Strange Room, the two novels that followed The Good Doctor.

Ah, I would have never have made the connection with Petterson but now you mention it I can see similarities. The prose style is very simple and yet Galgut, like Petterson, is able to convey all kinds of nuance and tension.

I have In a Strange Room on my pile, so I am itching to read it now. Thanks for the tip.

Yes, Rough Ghosts, well spotted, there is a similarity, both writing with such careful restraint about the interior man. But as Kim points out about these characters representing the old South Africa and the new, the causation seems so different. It seems to me that the characters in Galgut’s book *must* work through this new relationship because so much has been invested in shaping this new South Africa, and they dare not fracture it while it is so fragile, Whereas Petterson is (I think) depicting a long held culture of restraint and lack of openness. I haven’t been to northern Europe (unless you count St Petersburg) but years ago my English teacher who was of Swedish descent told me that many things inhibit a friendly openness in the Nordic countries: the weather, the landscape, the fact that the language doesn’t even have words for many things, and I have a Norwegian friend here who says the same. To me, Petterson seems like a young man questing to break open that wall of cultural reserve. (Mind you, in my travels around the world I have met some lovely sunny friendly Norwegian tourists, so everything I’ve said could be a load of old hogwash…)

Sorry to be late in responding to this… been a bit busy since posting this review.

I’d argue that Petterson is very much concerned with family relationships — in particular, how the order of your birth can affect your relationship with other siblings, and the problem of growing up with a volatile/violent father. In all his books he seems to be working through the ties that bind, as it were, and trying to reconcile his relationship with his dad.

I’ve met/know many Scandinavians and visited Denmark several times, and I would certainly not describe them as reserved. They remind me of Australians, actually: forthright, not afraid to speak their minds, and friendly.

Interesting observations Lisa. Galgut has always written with a wisdom beyond his years and from a very early age. I think it has been difficult for South African writers to avoid facing the tensions in their newly defined nation, but when you see him placing his story elsewhere as in In A Strange Room or Arctic Summer (which are both very different works) those unspoken tensions are still central to his theme. Living in a northern country I often feel a great affinity to Petterson’s intimate backdrops, but then I am a huge fan of South African lit and recently returned from my first visit to that country. It is still a very complex and fragile place.

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I’m yet to try Galgut but thanks to roughghosts his name is firmly on my list and I have ‘In a Strange Room’ waiting on my Kindle. This one sounds worth looking for.

I have In a Strange Room waiting on my Kindle, too — I’m looking forward to reading it, because if it’s anything like The Good Doctor, it will be a terrific read.

For the record, The Impostor is spare and dark in a manner similar to The Good Doctor. In a Strange Room is the result of his attempts to write about actual trips that he took in his life, the result is exceptional and not like anything else.

So glad you enjoyed this . I read it when it came out …..very powerful read and one of my all time fave books

I can understand why it’s one of your all-time faves… it’s a really memorable and affecting book.

Like Helen, I’m so glad you enjoyed this one, Kim. His prose style is quite remarkable, isn’t it? As you say, it appears simple and effortless and yet he manages to convey so much. Thanks for reminding me of this excellent novel.

I really admire authors who can write with restraint and who don’t spell everything out; they treat their readers with intelligence, which means you can fill in the gaps yourself, which, in turn, makes the reading experience so much richer.

This is an author I have never heard of, but will be sure to check out now! Thanks for the review!

Pleased to have introduced you to a new author, Naomi.

Same, I haven’t heard of him either and I’m very surprised that my local library has 2 copies of this book. Of course, I had to reserve one 🙂

Pleased to hear your library has him in stock: librarians obviously love him, seeing as it is librarians who nominate books for the Dublin IMPAC award, which he was shortlisted for in 2005. Be interested in hearing what you think of this if you do get around to reading it…

I did read it and really enjoyed it. I am busting to have a conversation with someone about which doctor was right about Tehogo – the protagonist or Dr Ngema???

I think the protagonist was right…

I still think this is Galgut’s best book (though I haven’t read Arctic summer yet) – one I have often recommended to people. I very much enjoyed being reminded of it This seems a much more political work than Petterson’s.

Thanks for your comment. It seems to be one of those books that people have very fond memories of… so glad to remind you how much you enjoyed it.

Back in 2003, I went to a multi-author reading to see someone else, and Galgut blew me away reading from The Good Doctor. I got a signed copy and remember really loving it. I’m glad you called it “dream-like,” because what little I remember of it now feels like a dream. Glad to learn it holds up well.

Thanks, Bradley. A great reading by an author can certainly make an impression — sounds like Galgut’s reading made a lasting one on you. Thanks for your comment.

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Book review: The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut

Apartheid has gone, but their hospital somehow remains, poorly resourced, its staff all waiting for something to happen, the few serious cases they encounter transferred out. Some staff see salvation in moving on, others wallow in resignation. Laurence is young, idealistic, determined to shake things up. But there are complex social and political forces in play, and his actions have terrible consequences.

The Good Doctor is the perfect short novel. Frank’s voice is so intense that any more would be too much. It takes you into a world that is uniquely its own, a dark, claustrophobic place where nothing is certain or familiar, where you are constantly stumbling for sense, where the emotions are vivid but the facts are contingent.

Galgut’s writing is brilliant: terse, fierce, like being jabbed in the chest relentlessly. It is astonishing but you don’t quite know how it’s done. Like the greatest prose, the magic somehow rests in the space between the words.

The Good Doctor doesn’t preach or explain. While it dissects the cruel absurdities of oppression and corruption, the word apartheid doesn’t appear once. You experience the world anew, without assumptions, preconceptions or easy explanations. You must decipher images, snatches of dialogue, gestures, the arrangement of a room.

This novel has my favourite kind of ending, neither too tightly tied up, nor hanging unresolved. The world at the end has irrevocably changed, but it is for the reader to decide how.

View The Good Doctor on Goodreads

For another short, intense literary novel, take a look at my review of Hot Milk by Deborah Levy .

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Published by Kate Vane

I write crime and literary fiction and share reviews and bookish thoughts on my blog. View all posts by Kate Vane

Short and intense novels–what a great reading project! I’ve not read this one of his, but I just read Arctic Summer last year and was really impressed. Did you enjoy this one enough to read more of his writing as well?

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I think I’ve read another one a while back, but can’t remember offhand what it was. Certainly I’d like to read more.

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Totally agree! Love this writer’s work. Sometimes hard for those of us who are not from that country and don’t know the history to understand the complexities and nuances. But the writing is compelling and we are drawn in despite our lack of knowledge.

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The Good Doctor Summary & Study Guide

The Good Doctor Summary & Study Guide Description

This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut. The Good Doctor is set in a neglected, deserted, ill-supplied and crumbling rural hospital. The hospital is in the predominately poor, black section of post-apartheid South Africa which was previously called the homelands. The book opens with the arrival of Dr. Laurence Waters who is a recent medical school graduate with high ideals and a need to "make a difference." The initial and prophetic pronouncement made upon him by Dr. Frank Eloff a disillusioned veteran physician is that Dr. Walters won't last.

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BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Young Doctor Finds a Potent Remedy for His Idealism

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By Richard Eder

• March 19, 2004

THE GOOD DOCTOR

By Damon Galgut

215 pages. Grove Press. $23.

''I don't understand.'' Thus Laurence Waters, young, idealistic, and bent on making a difference at the rural medical center in South Africa, where he arrives for his first posting.

He'd imagined a teeming workload, throngs of needy patients, and overburdened doctors struggling spiritedly in a worthy cause. What he finds is cracked walls, broken windows, empty wards, no proper supplies or equipment, a disaffected skeleton staff and a scant trickle of the injured and ill.

Damon Galgut sets his novel in an inherited desolation. The ghost hospital is a leftover in the town center of a larger leftover: one of the homelands, or Bantustans, set up by the former apartheid regime as sad simulacra of its flourishing white territories.

''This was not a town that had sprung up naturally for the normal human reasons -- a river in a dry area, say, or a discovery of gold, some kind of historical event,'' says Frank Eloff, the novel's narrator. ''It was a town that had been conceived and planned on paper, by evil bureaucrats in a city far away, who had probably never even been there. Here is our homeland, they said, tracing an outline on a map, now where should its capital be? Why not here, in the middle? They made an 'X' with a red pen and all felt very satisfied with themselves, then sent for the state architects to draw up plans.''

Apartheid is gone, but its starved afterbirth remains. It is in evoking this starvation, more than in its overburdened and often awkward story, that the virtue of ''The Good Doctor'' lies.

The medical staff that wanly greets the newcomer is an assortment from history's discard basket. There is Dr. Ngema, the female director, a freedom-struggle veteran caught on the wrong side of an obscure political wrangle, rusticated and turned cautious bureaucrat. There are the Santanders, a doctor couple sent from Cuba in its glory days of revolutionary outreach; and Tehogo, a black male nurse whom apartheid has hollowed out and embittered. Mainly there is Frank, also hollowed in the apartheid days, not as victim but as a brief, tangential collaborator.

Frank's guilt was not action but inaction. As a young medical conscript assigned to one of the regime's border campaigns, he was pressed into service one day when his superior was away to monitor the vital signs of a prisoner under hideous interrogation by Moller, the unit's commandant. The fledgling doctor's impulse to protest flared weakly and died.

Now middle-aged and with other failures behind him, notably his marriage, Frank muffles his demons with a weary cynicism. His family's connections could have helped him; instead he holds to his bleak job, not in penance -- that would be too lively -- but in a self-punishing indifference. There is self-punishment as well with Maria, a black shopkeeper, in a liaison he wants to think holds a germ of love even as he knows it's basically payment for services rendered.

For the dead souls at the medical center, Laurence's arrival is an unwelcome wake-up blast. Frank shepherds him through this limbo (but familiar, after all, and in that respect comfortable) only to find his charge calling it hell and demanding improvement.

The new man is shocked that patients with any slightly serious complaint are invariably driven to the fully equipped hospital in the next town, and on the other side of the old homeland line. He protests everything he sees, argues for action, for change. He proposes and eventually puts into effect a plan to hold one-day clinics in the hinterland villages.

Angrily Dr. Ngema tries to enlist Frank in a scheme to get Laurence to leave. Perhaps the most skillfully drawn character in a novel not much marked by subtlety, she is more than a threatened bureaucrat. In the young man's reforming zeal she senses a new version of the old white will to dominate.

What Frank senses is more complicated. ''I liked him,'' he tells us at one point, and we hear the note of doom. For one thing Laurence is willful, clumsy and maddeningly naïve; defects increasingly resented not only by Frank but by Laurence's visiting girlfriend who slips off for sex with the older Frank. Worse, the young activist threatens to rev up Frank's quite manageably twinging conscience.

A hint of betrayal hangs over the fairly rattly chain of events that follow. These include a visit to the homeland's former dictator, now in hiding: a haunting portrait of the melancholy of deposed evil. There are the obscure activities of a criminal gang that may or may not be under his control, and the reappearance of the brutal Colonel Moller with a detachment of troops.

The hospital nurse, Tehogo, disappears and returns gravely wounded; then a mysterious raid abducts him and takes Laurence as well. Whether Frank is indirectly responsible for his colleague's presumed death is one of a number of questions left hanging.

The moral dilemmas, some of the plotting and even the title of ''The Good Doctor'' do more than suggest Graham Greene's Vietnam parable, ''The Quiet American.'' Frank inevitably recalls the cynical British journalist Fowler in the mix of queasy beguilement and resentment he feels for Pyle, the young American activist. Like Pyle, Laurence perishes. But Frank's role, unlike Fowler's, consists at most of a momentary impulse followed by a lurch of carelessness.

Mr. Galgut circles his story with hoops of irony and tragedy, yet he is unable to tighten them as Greene did. Pyle's activism, even if distortedly idealistic, involves a horrible atrocity. Though not in the least admirable, Fowler rises, if one may use such a word, to an act of betrayal that is ugly but roughly justified, however mixed the motives. No such demanding stakes play out in Mr. Galgut's considerably laxer morality tale.

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