Grahame CW Howard Troubador Publishing, 2015, PB, 336pp, £10.99, 978-1784620950
PERFECT HELL
It must have been great fun writing this novel — targets and protocols, common sense outlawed, individuality discouraged and no question of using discretion. It might sound like just another day in the life of a foot soldier in the NHS. And as a retired clinical oncologist, surely Grahame Howard must have been inspired by the crumbling edifice that is the NHS. But the world portrayed here is not the NHS: it is a country where the protocol is king and the population has lost completely the ability to think for itself.
The Euthanasia Protocol occupies a middle ground between the teen fiction of The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) and the Harry Potter novels (JK Rowling) and the classic novels Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell) and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).
The young hero, throughout most of the book simply known as ‘boy’, has been rejected by a protocol-driven society because, for whatever reason, he does not exist on the national database and therefore is deemed not to exist. He meets ‘the old man’ by chance. The old man stands gazing through the windows of the local euthanasia practice, wondering whether to sign up for the voluntary programme. Together, they embark on a great adventure.
This is their story. It’s a gripping tale, simply written, where the bad guys are only a shade more ridiculous than the politicians and officials we read about every day in our newspapers.
But there is a serious message here. The average age of the population is increasing. Medical science helps us all live longer; we’re no longer dying of the things that used to kill us. Imagine the state offering to pay people to end their lives rather than paying to prolong life at whatever cost?
Living in a world driven by protocol, where people can no longer think for themselves, may not be too far from reality. Machine-driven protocols already help us decide what car insurance to buy — but just wait until there’s a protocol to tell us how to live and when to die.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2015
