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‘AN IRISH COUNTRY DOCTOR’ by Patrick Taylor, Brandon, June 2009, £8.99, pb, 322 pages, ISBN:978-0- 86322-400-3.
More faction than fiction, for Doctor Taylor calls heavily on his own experiences as an Ulster country doctor, the characters in this book first saw life in a series of humourous medical tales in ‘Stitches’, the apt name for the ‘Medical Journal of Humour’. Indeed it was the editor who encouraged the development of these characters and their hilarious stories into novel form. Patrick Taylor is an experienced Irish novelist, and writer of humour, and it shows.
‘An Irish Country Doctor’ is a deceptively simple novel, and guaranteed to make readers laugh. Lovers of James Herriot’s ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ will enjoy this novel, substitute people for animals and you have the same sort of laughter over peculiar country practises, larger than life eccentrics, and humanity’s foibles.
Patrick Taylor writes of a remote Ulster community in the early 1960s, seen through the eyes of a newly qualified doctor, assistant to the irascible older doctor, a well established character who does not do things by the medical book. Those of us who remember the delightful television series: ‘Doctor Finlay’s Casebook’ will see shades of young apprentice Doctor Finlay and choleric Doctor Cameron here, and indeed the novel would make a delightful, humourous television series. I certainly hope a sequel is being written.
The book is a tonic in itself and should be available on prescription. Do buy it for any one who needs cheering up.
pdr lindsay
Tags: an irish country doctor, author patrick taylor, good book, good fiction, good novel, great books, great reading, novel
