THE FOOT OF CLIVE by John Berger

Having spent my fair share of time in hospital over the years, I’m all too familiar with the strange communities of circumstance that coagulate on ward. So it was with a certain sense of unease that I read John Berger’s dark, dense novella, The Foot of Clive, in which a disparate bunch of (white) Englishmen find themselves thrown together in the arse end of a fledgling NHS hospital. The odd sense of transient friendship is challenged by the arrival of a new patient: a notorious criminal who has landed in hospital after a failed bank robbery. Behind a screen and under police protection, he has, they all know, killed a cop.

Like much of Berger’s fiction, Clive is both experimental in form and heavy on social commentary. The criminal’s presence forces the other patients to confront their own moral failings. For a while, I thought it was a secure ward, so troubling were the confessions. It makes for an interesting, if sluggish, examination of post-War English society in which the only hero - the NHS - does not seem quite so shiny when viewed through a contemporary lens.

Orwellian in intention, though a little too dour in execution.

The Foot of Clive by John Berger
Canongate, 2023 (First Pub. 1962)
180 pages