Review: Vivien Horler

Single Minded, a novel, by Marina Auer (Kwela)

The tagline on the cover is: “Welcome to Eden [State Hospital]. Good luck getting out alive.” Part 1 is titled: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

You get the picture.

It is January 2001and anaesthetist Murphy Meyer arrives at the hospital outside Pietermaritzburg on her first day in a new job. A crooked sign pockmarked with bullet holes proclaims “no firearms past this point”.

The driveway is potholed, and alighting from her car she nearly falls into an open drainage pit that has what she thinks is a kitten swimming in it, until it emerges and shows itself to be a rat.

Her horror sees a patient leaning on a crutch almost fall over with mirth.

Inside the hospital is not much better, but Murphy has come to Eden on a mission – she wants to know what happened to Esther, the nanny who gave the small Murphy the love and nurturing her own mother did not. Esther has been a patient at Eden, but no one seems to know what has happened to her.

Murphy is given a baptism of fire: her first job is to assist with a patient who has been shot in the neck.

The staff are broadly welcoming, and she makes friends with Kheti Makwetu, a gynaecologist, whilen the head of the anaesthesiology department, a kindly Pole, takes a paternal interest in her.

But the hospital is a terrible place, where people with Aids go for help at a time when no real help is available in SA, where many of the medical staff do their best in impossible circumstances, but are fighting a losing battle.

What we readers know – and Murphy doesn’t, at this stage – is that something very strange is going on at Eden. This information is helpfully conveyed in the prologue.

A body is strapped to a homemade wheelchair and pushed through the hospital grounds to a steep bank, at the bottom of which is long grass.

“A doctor pushed the chair to the very edge of the incline, unbound the swaddling cloths and, with a heave and a grunt, expelled the patient into the air.

“The tall grass opened its many arms and welcomed the falling body into its final embrace.”

There’s more. Many patients believe a tokoloshe is on the loose in the hospital. And we soon discover there’s a sinister person called the Whistler – whose tuneless whistling is heard at all hours in the hospital corridors – with nefarious intentions.

Then one night in a dark tunnel connecting part of the hospital to another Murphy is attacked, and ends up fighting for her life. It won’t be the only time.

Author Marina Auer is a doctor in private practice in KwaZulu-Natal, and says in her acknowledgements the novel is loosely based on her experiences during internship and community service at a hospital outside Pietermaritzburg.

“One of the most difficult things about writing this novel was keeping the anecdotal scenes down to what actually served the storyline. Rats in beds; chickens in autoclaves; a crumbling edifice; a dent in the corrugated iron roof of the tunnel where a patient leapt from a window – it all happened and so much more.”

Single Minded is more than a hospital drama, it’s a dark thriller that reaches a terrifying climax. You won’t want to put it down.