[This is as much an attempt on my part to puzzle some sort of meaning out of this book as it is a review, so beware of spoilers - not that this is really a plot-driven book, because everything that happens is pretty clearly telegraphed anyway, but you have been warned]They say to write what you know, so Chris Adrian, a “lapsed atheist” divinity student pediatrician, wrote a story in which God breaks his covenant to never again flood the Earth and buries the world under seven miles of water, sparing only a miraculously-buoyant children’s hospital. God’s involvement, I should say, is actually questionable - there are a number of angels involved (one each of the preserving, recording, accusing, and destroying varieties) but God himself never puts in an appearance, and Jesus certainly never does (this is all very Old Testament).Our hero is Jemma Claflin (note the initials), a bumbling medical student who blames herself for the deaths of everyone she’s ever loved: a father lost to cancer, a mother who burned herself alive, a boyfriend who drunkenly drove himself into a tree, and, above all else, a brother: Calvin (hint, hint), three years older than Jemma, is the dominant figure in the childhood flashback sections of the book, which focus on the creepy almost-incestuous relationship between the two (complete with an insistence on Calvin’s part that Jemma never marry anyone but him...?) and always build up to an attempt on Calvin’s part to leave the Earth behind. This effort is successful at age 17 when he cuts out his own eyes and tongue and sets himself on fire (I think? The gruesome deaths in this book all kind of run together).Calvin, or Calvin’s spirit, resurfaces in some sense or another as the recording angel who narrates the book, aside from those sections in which he is caught up in an argument with the preserving angel. This latter figure is so named because she, in the form of a huge computer lodged within the base of the hospital, keeps the hospital afloat and its denizens fed, clothed, and entertained by means of a series of replicators that can produce any non-organic item they ask for. The humans get creative with this from time to time (most memorably in the form of a gadget that translates dolphinese), but mostly they just synthesize themselves new clothes and endless food and drink. No one, for example, seems to be curious enough to ask for any sort of vessel with which to explore their new world.This lack of curiosity is itself part and parcel of Adrian’s larger attack on the banality of our modern existence, I suppose. The hospital, sealed off and removed from the rest of the world in the middle of the night, has only a skeleton crew of medical personnel left to deal with a large number of very ill children, and so the continued business of daily micro-apocalypses of healing and dying simply overshadows the Apocalypse outside - for a while. I imagine this kind of blind-to-the-world, head-down-power-through insularity is something experienced by doctors/med students even without miles of water sloshing outside their hospital windows, and Adrian is nothing if not adept at showing his readers exactly how miserably tedious and banal this situation is. Readers are given no hand-holding at all as they are dropped into scene after scene of dense and alienating medical techno-jargon which is almost as far out of poor Jemma’s grasp as it is ours.Adrian also sets his sights on the banality of evil bureaucracy, that most-favored target of authors of post-apocalyptia, in the form of Dr. Snood (ugh), a surgeon and the de facto head honcho at the hospital. When Jemma finally manifests her miraculous healing powers (did I mention that Jemma magically gains some sort of miraculous healing powers?), Snood insists that she refrain from healing any of the children until her powers have been extensively tested and quantified. The work, Snood insists, is what they are there for, and what will get them through the end of all things.Not banal enough for you? How about the fact that the flood, a world-ending deluge that left behind nothing but the hospital, some marine life, and a cruise ship (more on that in a bit), is referred to by the survivors as the Thing. This is later amended to “the First Thing” or “the Bad Thing” after “the Thing Two:” Jemma’s restoration of the health of every person on board the hospital, an occurrence rendered banal in its own right by page after repetitious page of descriptions of Jemma laying hands upon the sick in order to inundate them with green fire. Thing Two, in turn, gives way to the Third Thing - which, in a book so concerned with the banality of not only the miraculous but also the mundane, turns out of course to be that most banal of all exercises in ceremonial (un)creativity: a wedding.Although never named as such in the text, there is also a Fourth Thing, a plague which kills all of the surviving adults and renders the children comatose (at least until they are deposited upon the new Eden), and which is the real apocalypse of the tale. It seems that we are supposed to understand this as a further punishment wrought by God upon the survivors for turning their replicator-supplied post-scarcity utopia into a non-stop party, but as the whole thing lasts only nine months (hint, hint) it hardly seems enough time for them to have stabilized their society into... what, anyway? And as mentioned above God never seems much involved with any of this - there’s certainly no burning bush anywhere here, the angels themselves are wracked with guilt and uncertainty, and, even if no one else sees it that way, Calvin/the recording angel is convinced that it was his own auto da fe that brought about this end."I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it," he tells us, and the blackness of sin there is literalized inasmuch as the plague slowly or quickly dissolves its victims into black ash - another repeated occurrence with which readers are beaten over the head via endless repetitious descriptions, although I must admit that this ending section, suffused with despair and ennui, is among the best in the book. The plague (or “the botch”) makes its appearance after the hospital encounters a derelict cruise ship creepily inhabited only by a thick coating of black ash and a single comatose boy. The boy, we and the hospital survivors find out by means of a conveniently preserved diary, was serially sexually abused by the other people aboard. Presumably, given Adrian’s predilections, this character was supposed to be some sort of Whore of Babylon stand-in, and is presented as the initiator of these sexual encounters.Now, I tend to use the word “creepy”--in the sense of the uncanny or grotesque--as a superlative in describing a lot of horror/dark fiction. With Adrian, though, some of what he is doing here is “creepy” more in the distasteful sense that I do not trust what he, as an author, is trying to accomplish... “good creepy” versus “bad creepy,” to put it bluntly. This lengthy--and, for all that I can tell, entirely superfluous--aside about sexual assault, the incestuous subtheme of the insufferable childhood chapters, the fact that Jemma’s role appears to boil down to motherhood alone - all leave me deeply suspicious of Adrian’s purposes here. I’m not sure what else I expected from a book so deeply rooted in Biblical allegory, though.But anyway, what are we to make of any of this?Why was this cruise ship spared, alone among all the world outside of the hospital? I understand the symbolism there, but the hospital itself had become something of a party ship by this point, and was already full of children who needed saving, so why introduce this new (bad creepy) element into a book that was already much, much longer than it needed to be?What was the significance of Brenda, the King’s Daughter, who was born the night of the Thing and who seems to be the Eve to Jemma’s child’s Adam, but then why “the Book of the King’s Daughter” to refer to the narrative of the hospital?Or, if Jemma is Mary and her child is Jesus, what does that make Brenda?Jemma is also in some sense Moses, leading her flock to the new land, but are we supposed to understand that she has successfully aided the children, or that she has failed the adults and been struck down for it? Both? Neither?Pickie Beecher is either a child with a variety of ailments, including pica, which leads to him eating blood, or else a 130-some-year-old vampire, which also leads to him eating blood. Either way, he’s Jemma’s chief disciple, and is viewed by the preserving angel as an abomination, and is then tossed overboard by the accusing angel (who has been disguised as an amnesiac pulled from the sea - why?), a while after which he floats back onto the hospital with no trace of his former character. Why?What? Why?
Holy mother, what a slog this book was. Where to begin with my frustrations with this read. Okay, first of all, let me just get this off my chest: the novel is absolutely riddled with typos–not exclusively a reflection of Mr Adrian's work, but between the author and the publisher, the sloppiness is inexcusable and distracts enormously from the story that, as a reader, you simply want to lose yourself in.And about that story: the one element of this book that strikes me most positively is the imaginative premise: Noah's flood has essentially happened again, and the sole survivors are the inhabitants of this children's hospital—patients, doctors, families, et al.—which is now made to float above the surface of the earth. Chris Adrian is classified as a magical realist, and the genre inherently requires suspension of disbelief; as far as the premise of the story goes, I'm good. But the plot devices that the author fashions in order to drive the story forward are lazily wrought, contrived, and too often simply absurd. Before the flood, an engineer was forewarned and turned the building into a boat; this new reality is governed by an angel, who, despite her divine substance, has no better way to communicate with the flood's survivors than over the hospital PA system; apart from the trauma of the world ending, life as the hospital's inhabitants know it isn't all that different than before–no deprivation of creature comforts–thanks to a "replicator," which makes to order basically anything that anybody wants at any time. How convenient.And the major plot turn centered on Jemma, the novel's heroine–I won't spoil it here, in case you decide to read the novel yourself, but: 1) I don't recommend you do; 2) COME ON. I would so much rather that the time spent on weird cartoonish scenes and green fire and everything else were spent on character development, so that I would give a damn about any of these unfortunate people. On the contrary, I couldn't care the slightest bit what happened to any of them. I kind of hoped they would all just die already so that I could go on to another read.Oh yeah, and about that angel–or rather, angelS, plural–they take turns narrating chapters, which is only very obscurely indicated by an innocuous symbol that heads each chapter, which, if you figure out early enough, congratulations, but otherwise is simply a source for greater confusion. Not that it much matters, since the novel is essentially narrated in third-person omniscient voice, until the author seemingly remembers that the multiple angel narration was supposed to be one of the book's central conceits, and he changes tone for a couple of pages at the end of any given chapter.One last gripe: Mr Adrian's training is in medicine, and don't you know it just about every other page. The guy gratuitously drops a shit ton of medical jargon–diseases, diagnoses, treatments– like it was common parlance–which, incidentally, we have a cousin who does the same, and it annoys the hell out of me.What a relief to finally be through with this book.
What do You think about The Children's Hospital (2006)?
I have never been very good at describing books to people.Mostly, I think, because the story has already been told in a way uniquely perfect to itself.And how could I try to improve upon that?So I will not describe this book to you, at least not in detail.It is 615 pages long, so even the description would be rather lengthy.But I will tell you to read it.Because you should.I don't even know if you will like it.I have read some reviews of it that weren't too enthusiastic.But I have also read some that were.I am no good at critiquing what I read.I read a book and fall into the story and when that happens I love it no matter what, so my opinions are useless.So maybe you will hate it.Maybe you won't even finish it.But you should try it nonetheless.It is the story of a modern-day Great Flood. Instead of an ark, there is a children's hospital that floats atop seven miles of water, God's wrath laid out in H2O.Instead of a Noah, there is a Jemma, a medical student in her third year of residency at this children's hospital, who happens to be fucking her boyfriend in a linen closet when the flood strikes.Instead of Noah's family, there are doctors and nurses and volunteers and aides and parents, all playing their own roles in the workings of the children's hospital.Instead of animals, there are children, hundreds and hundreds of desperately ill children, all of them relying on the children's hospital to make them well again.It is a wonderful story, well worth the patience it takes to read 615 pages. It is terrifying and wonderful, heart-warming and soul-crushing, impressive and amazing.It is terribly beautiful and beautifully terrible.It is awful, not in the bad way, but literally. It fills you with awe that such an ambitious story could be carried out so well.It leaves you empty, and full, and completely unexplainable.I am a nerd.I don't know why I like it so much.But I do.
—Lizzie Maguire
What a chore this book turned out to be. It started strong enough that I stuck with the first few hundred pages despite the lack of significant plot development, hoping something in the overall novel would redeem the whole. But by the time I got to page 400 or so, I realized I had been duped.The premise of The Children's Hospital is pretty cool: it's a modern-day Noah's Ark story, but with a floating hospital, and rare diseases instead of animals. But unfortunately, and perhaps deliberately, Adrian chose not to live up to this idea in any significant way. You'd think it would be impossible to turn such an idea into a total bore, but that would be underestimating Adrian's talent for tedium.Not that there are not some qualities to this book. For starters, the prose is good. There were moments when I enjoyed just reading the daily lives of the doctors as they focused on the hospital life despite the death of civilization outside the hospital walls. But page after page, my frustrations grew stronger and stronger.For starters, there are simply no likable characters in the book. Jemma, the protagonist, turns out to be boring, self-centered and totally lacking in imagination, despite having lived a unique childhood, and having extraordinary powers and events thrust upon her as an adult. None of this cracks Jemma's shell of self-defeating doubt.The same holds true of the rest of the cast. At times, the only notion that kept me sane was to repeat to myself that these characters were intended as satire. They certainly had no depth, and they make their way through the lack of plot with the resourcefulness of imbeciles.The overall effect is of a literary novel that tries very hard to be self-important and clever, but just exhausts you with each page. If this novel had been trimmed down to a slim 150 pages, it might have made for a quirky, cryptic read; but as it stands, it's just a bloated, preachy, self-deluded mess.
—Daniel Roy
I hit the biggest brick wall ever while reading this novel. What could have been a wonderful piece of modern fiction was instead an overblown, poorly-presented, self-assured, long-winded and ultimately unsatisfying attempt at science fiction. To be fair, parts of this novel were wonderful. These parts were all contained in a young gay cruise ship passenger's diary, where he documents his sexual exploits in code using Presidents' names. But in the end, my housemate and I decided that we hated it as much as your typical Dave Eggers novel/fictional autobiography. She hated it one full star less than I do.
—Lena Webb
