I came across this novel through a safari of hyperlinks through Roger Ebert’s review site. In the review of one movie (I forget which one now), the reviewer referenced a Scorsese nmovie I’d never heard of called Bringing Ou the Dead. I’m hardly a Scorsese expert, but I like what I’ve seen of his, so I looked into it and discovered the source novel by Joe Connelly.
Bringing Out the Dead is narrated by Frank Pierce, a burned out paramedic who works the night shift in Hell’s Kitchen, where he encounters a seemingly endless parade of human misery. Drawn from Connelly’s real life experiecne as a paramedic, the novel nevertheless takes on a surreal, otherworldly quality, as the scenarios encountered seem too harsh, too bleak, to bizarre to be a straightforward image of life in that time and place (though maybe I’m just naive).
This sense of unreality is reinforced by Frank’s dry description of ghosts from cases past, some who haunt him mutely from the edges of perception, others who insert themselves into his reality in an endless series of loops. He encounters the same girl, Rose, about a dozen times, each instance revealing a little bit more about the original Rose, a girl who he failed to save and who has thus inserted herself into his psyche, sliding in deep like a sliver of guilt.
Some of the cases seem medically impossible, such as the corrupt garbage kingpin who (briefly) survives having his head crushed by onbe of his garbage trucks, and the cases form the dispatcher grow increasingly strange, dissolve into litanies of suicides and informed by details a 911 dispatcher couldn’t possibly know. There are moments of shocking violence described without hyperbole or ramification. At one point one of Frank’s partners runs over an injured person. Was it a ghost? A hallucination? Did the guy know what he’d done? Did he care? Frank doesn’t say.
The novel seems less interested in reporting the veracity of events than in capturing a mood. Five years as a paramedic in a poor neighbourhood is no doubt a tough gig, and the story does a good job of illustrating what burnout probably feels like. Frank’s nights as a medic seem less like an occupation than a curse, a sisyphean ordeal foisted on him from some past misdeed.
The prose is hallucigenic but believable, a tough combination in first person, where overwriting can easily become apparent. A good book overall.