Beyond Expectations

Just finished John Berger's haunting account of the life of a country doctor, A Fortunate Man. Though generally familiar with Berger's work I'd never heard of this book until I came across a fascinating article on it in the Graun late last year. It sounded like the kind of thing that I would enjoy and such proved to be the case, despite the fact that in some respects it's very much a book of its time - that time being 1967. But then the pressing concerns of a particular time, when fierce enough, can prove to be concerns which engage us in the here and now of human experience.

Must say, it felt a touch unnerving to find myself reading quite detailed references to two writers with whom I've been pretty intensely engaged in the last few weeks, namely Conrad and Sartre - and not just any Sartre, but his first novel which I only finished a week or so ago. Not at all expected and oddly synchronous.

And it also felt strange to read A Fortunate Man in the light of my knowledge (acquired through reading the Comments section following the article I referred to earlier) that the doctor involved, a thoroughly admirable man, took his own life some fifteen years after the publication of Berger's work. Knowing this significantly altered what would have been a more innocent reading of the text and seemed to deepen my reading - though I'm wary of being overly-presumptuous in that regard. I'm not sure I have the capacity to match the depth of Berger, even knowing what he couldn't have known when writing.