A disturbingly on point debut, we review The Waiting Rooms
The Waiting Rooms – the blurb
Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
A work of fiction?
I could talk about the story line for The Waiting Rooms: a woman with a shady past that is now catching up with her mixed with a ‘present day’ search for a birth mother but I wont. That’s not the thing that grabbed me most about this book. What got me was the glimpse in to a future that Smith offered that could oh so easily be true. I read the book during lock down and sometimes felt positively uncomfortable reading about curfews, shopping delivery slots and mask wearing. I mean it was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2017 so it hasn’t been speed written and thrown to publishing. Yet the vision it paints is so disturbingly accurate. It really feels like we are on the precipice of this book actually happening.
Instead of the Corona virus we are faced with an antibiotic crisis – they have stopped working and forgotten diseases such as TB have made a huge comeback. In a world where even a scratch from a kitten could kill you Smith reinforces this by little snippets (adverts/newspaper articles) about things such as ‘safe swimming experiences’. The fact some of the newspaper articles are set so far before the Crisis is also startling. The impression is very much given that we in 2020 are already too late for whatever crisis is waiting round the corner for us.
Another Final Solution?
Smith doesn’t shy away from asking some brutal questions. Is denying drugs to the elderly just a different Final Solution? Mass mobs arrive in similar scenes to the recent Black Lives Matter protests. Once again driving the reality of The Waiting Rooms home to the reader. It’s unrelenting.
There were a few little plot niggles towards the end of the book but it didn’t spoil what overall was a good read. Disturbing in its accuracy, believe-ability, and current-ness. I’m not sure I enjoyed the book, the timing was wrong for me but I did like it. If you are struggling with lock down/Corona virus anxiety at the moment this might not be the book for you now. But it’s well worth a read, just make sure you don’t leave it too late.