The book opens in Devon in 1772 with the brutal and clumsy autopsy of a man, the participating doctors curious to find the secret of his unique ‘talent’. From then, the chronology is sliced and diced, but essentially the novel narrates the short life and interesting times of the man on the slab, James Dyer.
His conception, on a frozen pond in 1739, is brief and ungentle, with his mother compliant, but ignorant of the identity of the father. She is already married, and James’ strangeness, a cuckoo in the nest, is apparent early on. He does not cry, and neither does he speak. Only when he falls out of a tree and breaks his leg, does someone cotton on that he feels no pain.
That opens career opportunities that take in fairground quackery, a pampered curio in a gentleman’s collection, naval enlistment and, finally, medicine. James Dyer turns out to be very good at medieval surgery, for it is so much easier to concentrate and keep a steady hand with no empathy to the un-anesthetised patients’ pain.
But there is a downside. If you cannot feel pain, what is your experience of pleasure? And if something changes, what would it be like to feel, as an adult, pain for the first time? And would all those old wounds, many voluntarily accepted for show, now demand their agonies be felt?
There is an authentic period feel to the prose
that richly describes landscapes, characters, and events in the story. It is an
interesting romp through eighteenth century life that would make a good read
even without Dyer’s unusual physiology. The reader is drawn in, feels the pain
that James Dyer doesn’t; then feels it double when he does.
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