Don’t believe this title
Carl Shuker’s novel A Mistake is anything but. This is a precisely crafted, nuanced, riveting book that dares to open up and probe all manner of assumptions — from gender roles in the workplace to national standards, in light of the international pressure of readers’ speculation about character likeability, to what it might mean to consider various versions of the truth.
A Mistake is the story of Elizabeth Taylor, a gifted Wellington surgeon who behaves in ways perceived by her superiors to be unorthodox. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that those who can will seek to punish her for the mistakes she is, rightly or wrongly, adjudged to have made. In exposing the minefields in Taylor’s life, Shuker also picks at the encrusted layers of assumption that New Zealanders in this book operate within.
The novel is about life in Wellington — and the plot reveals the smallness of this and what this can tell us about being seen and evaluated, about privacy, sexuality, gender expectations, about professional tribalism, opportunities for change and space for difference.
As we come to know Taylor, we’re inclined to pass judgement on her just as her colleagues do. Because of the way Shuker has developed his central character, we’re meant, just like the other characters in the book, to assess her, to second-guess her, to even backtrack to earlier scenes to try and confirm or deny her potential blameworthiness.
We try to suss out how Taylor does or does not make a mistake and how those around her, including us readers, then judge her. Shuker has made Taylor a not terribly likeable character by conventional standards. The novel ensures we’re kept off balance in this regard — are we on Taylor’s side or not? Do we root for her or is she indefensible? We begin to fall into the trap of maligning her, judging her, only to have Shuker quickly pivot and show us more complexity, other facets of her personality. Taylor is not easily readable; she’s not one thing or the other.
Shuker tells us Taylor’s compelling story in luminous, precise language. His cutting lines and lyrical turns of phrase will take your breath away. When Elizabeth is in theatre we read that “On screen sudden bright blood rose in the seams of the red geography of the inflamed tissues. They watched as the blood filled the cavity. It rose and it rose and it did not stop, and so close on the tiny camera, lapping gently as if in a breeze.” And later in the novel when Elizabeth is at home in Newtown we read that “Outside the wind blew and the old house cracked . . . The streetlight through the trees and the stained glass of the bathroom window made a strange camouflage that flexed across the wall.” Shuker’s prose often reads like poetry with its vivid, visceral effect.
Shuker interleaves Taylor’s fictional story with a harrowing contemporaneous account of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. The Challenger timeline is broken up and inserted within the plot of Shuker’s novel, creating distilled and evocative moments that provide a palimpsest of mistake, causality and blame that allows us to reinterpret the cascade of error and liability in Taylor’s fictional story.
As we read of the sequence of events leading inevitably to the shuttle disaster, we are also privy to suggestive scenes of Taylor confronting the spoken and unspoken assumptions swirling around her. The novel asks us to consider both of these “beautiful stor[ies] of error” and all that this error implies and reveals. As Taylor reminds us, “Mistakes may always happen.”