May 1961
Mr. Shaw’s previous book The Hiding Place, was one of the best first novels that I have read. Is this as successful a piece of work? No. Is it a disappointment? Unless, like children, one wants Mr. Shaw to ‘do it again’ - meaning exactly the same thing in exactly the same way - no, it isn’t a disappointment either. The Sun Doctor, as second novels should be, is a much more ambitious novel, with a larger theme, more canvas, and consequently, more slack - so to speak - to take up on.
Dr. Benjamin Halliday comes back to England after twenty-five years in West Africa to receive a Knighthood. These years, which have all been spent in unremitting efforts to relieve human physical suffering, have left him exceedingly lonely, and indeed at almost every kind of loss.
In the second part of the book we go back a year or two, to tropical Africa (Angola or the Congo) where Halliday is searching for a particular herb known to grow in this sick, swampy region. He meets a native of the swamps who conducts him to an island in the interior which is inhabited by an extraordinary and pathetic community, where the sick rule the healthy by suggestion and are thereby preserved and served, although the village as a whole is slowly but perceptibly dying from under-nourishment as a result of this rule. Halliday stays with them, and becomes obsessed with the desire to prove to the healthy servants that they are not in fact subject to the miserable natural restrictions from which their poor sick chiefs are suffering, but in his anxiety to prevent further physical misery, he inflicts the utmost damage of another kind upon someone wholly vulnerable and innocent and his necessity to come to terms with this makes the rest of this book.
Mr. Shaw has managed to convey his Mandan community - their country, climate, behaviour and nature - with triumphant conviction: this kind of effect is only realized when intelligence and imagination are really combining to serve a natural novelist’s purpose. The trouble - or weakness - about the novel is in connection with Dr. Halliday. The danger signals are the need the author has to explain him - notably in terms of his childhood - which recurring parts of the book add nothing to the whole, and in fact often take the edge off it, and this need for explanation about a central character nearly always occurs when his creator is having to justify a partial understanding of what he is trying to make. Mr. Shaw is also unduly careless about detail and I point this out only because I think he has the capacity, and therefore no excuse for not taking infinite pains. But over and above this carping it is a novel entirely worth reading.