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Estd. 2020
Centenary
Project
2027
Approved by the Shaw Family
1961
The Sun Doctor centres on Benjamin Halliday, a British doctor working in Africa who is returning to England to receive a knighthood.
However, he is tormented with feelings of remorse and guilt concerning the afflicted African tribe he was attending. He is also haunted by the early death of his father. The story is told mostly in flashback. It is based on the play Strange Providence. It won the 1962 Hawthornden Prize.
the sun doctor
Shaw's second novel tells the story of a troubled doctor who has been working in Africa and has returned to England to be awarded a knighthood. His problems stem partly from his alcoholic father who died prematurely (like Shaw's) and partly because of certain things he has done to - or failed to do for - the afflicted African tribe he was trying to help.
Laden with guilt, he goes through a personal crisis, and the bulk of the book is told in flashback.
It's curiously affecting and the African parts are particularly vivid - a real feat of imagination and research as I believe this was outside of Shaw's own experience. This is Joseph Conrad / Graham Greene territory and, while it has its flaws, it's well worth a read if you appreciate those authors.
"Consolidates his place as a writer, whole and proven and one of the powerful talents" - Daily Mail
"Shaw writes with startling originality" - The Times Literary Supplement
"Shaw can command anything. This novel is funny, tender, exciting, reflective and ingenious by turns" - The London Times
"A certainty of touch and sheer intensity" - The New Statesman
A LAND WHERE THE SICK MEN RULED
ROBERT SHAW is an actor who is currently displaying his considerable talents on Broadway in "The Caretaker." He is also a novelist, but he is not nearly so interesting or successful in that role. His second book, "The Sun Doctor," is a moral study, or at least an attempt to investigate certain aspects of human action from an ethical, even a quasi-religious, point of view.
It is set in England and Africa and concerns the crisis in the life of a doctor—a Schweitzer-like figure who has become celebrated for his selfless devotion to the natives, but has begun to doubt his motives as a healer and the entire structure of his existence. The book begins with his return to London to receive a knighthood.
From then on it moves back and forth in chronology and place until the dénouement. In a remote region of Angola the doctor had come upon a village whose extraordinary social system stemmed from the circumstance that some of the inhabitants suffered from a disease causing an inability to sweat. The sick ones had constituted themselves chieftains and had convinced the others, the "servants," that to perspire was the real fatality.
To release them from this bizarre and pitiable enslavement, the doctor had managed to win their confidence—but he had accomplished it chiefly through a calculated act, in which he had taken advantage of one of the village girls' innocent passion for him. This is the source of his present guilt and the precipitating agent in his eventual realization that he has always really used his healing powers to gain love for himself.
At that point he repudiates his past, embarks on a spiritually educative love-affair with his housekeeper, undergoes something of a conversion—to greater selflessness if not to belief—and returns to Africa with humility and new purpose.
Thematically, the novel is thin, arbitrary and mostly unconvincing. What is worse, its language is a dead one, a diction for story-tellers-by-the-fire, never an instrument of exploration or combat with experience. Writing as flat and undistinguished as this makes one wonder about the state of criticism in England, where Mr. Shaw has apparently been hailed as another Conrad or Graham Greene. I'm afraid it takes more than an exotic setting and periodic invocations to "the heart of the matter" to turn that trick.
Richard Gillman - New York Times 1961
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