withdrawing treatment
Master of suspense
With a number of appointments scheduled this week involving lengthy waits, I turned to one of my favourite authors for a book to slip in my bag to absorb my attention. And once again Robert Goddard was not found wanting, doing what he does so brilliantly yet again in Out of the Sun – an apt title for so much skullduggery and conspiracy and dark doings.
Harry Barnett gets a call out of the blue to say his son David Venning is in a coma at the National Neurological Hospital. But … Harry didn’t know he even had a son! David’s mother Iris is adamant she didn’t call him, and she’s equally sure only she and David knew Harry was his father.
Then it transpires that David was found in a locked hotel room following an overdose of insulin, and the notebooks containing his groundbreaking work are missing. He’s a diabetic anyway so suicide is not an unreasonable option, but there are far too many questionable aspects surrounding this case, not least relating to two other scientists who also worked for the same company as David, Globescope (a Washington-based socio-economic forecasting corporation) who have died in suspicious circumstances – one under a train, the other from carbon monoxide poisoning. And then there’s the fact that all three of them, as well as four other top-ranking academic-prodigies/employees, were sacked from Globescope recently, and the others are all now in hiding.
Unravelling the mysteries surrounding the son he never knew consume Harry, taking him to foreign lands, and into danger as well as unfathomable realms of mathematics and sciences he’s never even heard of. Everyone agrees David was obsessed by his discoveries; on the brink of something earth-shattering some would say. But Harry’s instincts take him down completely the wrong path and nearly get him killed. And when he does finally begin to understand just who was behind the murders he finds himself facing moral quandaries beyond his imagining, and surreal experiences that defy logic.
Conspiracy. Concealment. Confusion. They were the prevailing echoes.
Interwoven with the tensions is a tender but tentative love story, and a thread of moral questions about if and when it might be appropriate to remove the mechanical ventilation from David, and who should decide. The specialist is confident that there’s no realistic prospect of recovery from such a profound coma, and those who know him as an outstandingly clever mathematician agree he would certainly not want to be living life with severe brain damage. However, Harry’s heard there’s a new wonder drug that might save him and he’s part of the race against time to procure it … but he’s not the one footing the bill for David’s medical care.
With short snappy chapters, a racing twisting plot, blind alleys and shocking revelations aplenty, this proved to be exactly the right choice for filling in all those tedious waiting times, even if I was completely out of my depth with the mathematical complexities which lie at the centre of the plot. I can only take my hat off to an author who tackles such immensely complicated topics with such skill.