‘It’s the only thing that made me feel alive’

Christie Watson is astonished by the bravery of a trauma surgeon who risks his life in war zones

WWAR DOCTOR

304pp, Picador, £18.99, e-book £11.51

ar Doctor is the story of a trauma surgeon compelled by danger. David Nott has spent 25 years taking unpaid sabbaticals from his job as an NHS vascular surgeon to travel to conflict zones including Sierra Leone, Iraq, Dafur, Yemen and Gaza, as well as volunteering in areas such as Nepal and Haiti following natural disasters.

A love for Syria, however, is the thread that runs through his heart. Nott describes his returning trips there since 2012 as “the most extraordinarily fulfilling, frustrating and dangerous of all”.

The stakes in each place are impossibly high, and often as much about lack of resources and infrastructure as shrapnel and bullets. In Sarajevo, where he went in 1993 for his first mission with Médecins Sans Frontières, “The operating department in which we were working was freezing. The water was cold when I washed my hands, my theatre gown was soon tatty and torn, and we ran out of surgical masks, so I would watch my breath condensing in the cold air.”

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. There is so much horror. The descriptions of surgery are unsparing, detailing the bones and flesh and blood.

But the real darkness is in Nott’s illustrations of the capacity that humans have to become monsters. The passages about his attempts to save children who had suffered sexual violence as a weapon of war were hard to read. I have 20 years of nursing under my belt, but had thankfully never before heard of a “foetal necrosectomy”, the details of which I will spare you.

That Nott doesn’t distinguish – in the operating theatre at least – between a nine-year-old girl who has been raped and a mass murderer is as much a testament to his faith as his professionalism: “I hoped that one day he might have found out that the doctor who had helped him was a Christian with no feelings of prejudice or hate towards him.”

In any case, in the operating room, there is no time for judgment. He describes the realisation that one man on his operating table was a member of Isil: “I had known exactly who my patient was and could make an educated guess about the kinds of things he had done or might do. And yet, I still firmly believe that it was my duty to save his life.”

Why is Nott drawn to this? In the opening chapters we learn of his childhood in Trelech, a village in Wales, his obsession with

Airfix planes (he later becomes a pilot) and how his interest in war was cemented when watching

The Killing Fields (though I was reminded of Jim in Empire of the Sun throughout the book). From these safe beginnings he went on to travel the world “in search

Y347pp, Head of Zeus, £14.99, ebook £7.99

ou don’t need to be on mind-altering drugs to read Ben Okri’s latest novel, but I suspect it would help. It’s set in a not entirely implausible-sounding future, at least initially, in which “books have become rare” and “the economy was managed by a handful of super bankers. Newspapers ceased to exist … Television was run by the people. Programmes consisted of the daily life of the populace. Radio stations had fallen to ranters…”

Amid this cultural and intellectual torpor, the Hierarchy – a faceless, ubiquitous authority – reign unquestioned. The people, who rarely smile, accept the limits of their physical and spiritual existence, assuming that what they see is all there is. Until, one day, a heretical question appears spray-painted on walls, buses and billboards: “Who is the prisoner?”

The Hierarchy execute a crackdown, taking away suspected dissenters, including the sphinxlike girlfriend of a young man called Karnak, but the question has entered the bloodstream of the people. They scream in their sleep, and burst into spontaneous weeping during the day. The Hierarchy, driven to distraction by their inability to

maintain control, turn into jackals and start eating the people alive.

Running parallel to this peculiar, nightmarish satire is a second story about a grandfather who reads to his grandson the old myths that hint of worlds beyond. The boy is gripped by the possibility that hidden unknowns exist (one can’t help thinking of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” speech here) and that his grandfather, who is on his last legs, is telling him these stories for a reason. “Find the elixir of freedom,” urges the grandfather. “Bring it back to the people so that we may all be free.”

Slowly, the stories of Mirababa, the grandson, and of Karnak, who senses that his missing girlfriend and the answer to the graffiti are linked, start to come together.

Karnak discovers an underground bookshop, containing the world’s last remaining writers, and a madhouse full of laughing inmates. Mirababa, meanwhile, wakes up trapped inside a stone sarcophagus and, after experiencing fantastic visions, realises that it is his destiny to go beyond the edges of his conscious mind and thus, in some way, redeem the world.

Okri, the author of 14 works of fiction, including 1991’s The Famished Road – which made him, at 32, the youngest winner of the Booker Prize – has long been interested in the possibilities of anti-realism, in which dream states have as much currency as naturalism. Here, he throws into the mix biblical and Buddhist allegory alongside out-of-body