Book review

Richard Lehman

Iain Bamforth The Good European Carcanet Press 2006 PB, 218 pages, £16.95, 1 857547 65 9

Do you ever wonder what you might have done had you not settled for the material and moral comforts of British general practice? Might you, perhaps, have been a doctor in the Australian outback? Or a poet? Or mastered the German philosophers from Kant, Fichte and Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger? Or compiled the best collection of literature related to medicine? Or settled in Strasburg and used your fluent multilingualism as translator to the European parliament? Or read every French novelist and philosopher, to put you in a proper position to put down the pretentious falsity of French intellectual life? Alternatively, might you have gone off and helped to set up primary care services in the Far East?

Perhaps you might have done all of these, and a lot else in your spare time: in that case, you must be Iain Bamforth, the author of this dazzling collection of essays and reviews. Had he remained in one place, he might come to have been called a national treasure; as it is, his collection defines him as The Good European; and as he really is, he can only be described as an international figure.

If you think I am exaggerating, get hold of this book, or his literary anthology of modern medicine, The Body In The Library. Neither makes any concession to the hand-me-down traditions of doctors who like to have a bit of culture. Just as the anthology contains his own translations from Danish, Hungarian, Portuguese, French and German, so his book of essays makes astonishing connections across an entirely individual selection of works by European writers. And all the while, the dark suspicion lingers that he reads them in their original languages. If you know the works he alludes to — and you might have read a tenth of them in translation — you will realise that he knows them from the inside, and wants to tell you what they are saying in relation to each other. For all its extraordinary brilliance, there is nothing academic about this collection. It will make your mind leap and gambol following his. Give your brain a treat and buy it.