Paper Mask- The Book

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/cabal-on-paper-mask.html.
I occasionally go through phases in which I feel totally masochistic. This time, in order to stop myself beating my own forehead with a cricket bat I decided to do something I've been plucking up courage to do for a very long time, I've read the book of Paper Mask. The novel A Paper Mask was published in 1987 and penned by the film's screenwriter, a Scotsman called John Collee. The author is surprisingly mainstream, having been behind far superior productions such as Happy Feet and Star Cops. He comes from Edinburgh and graduated in medicine from its university. He practiced in Cambridge, probably Addenbrooke's, also Bath and Bristol. This may be why the Harris/Hennessey character flees to Bristol under his fake identity. Matthew Harris is very like Ripley, the antihero of a series of books by Patricia Highsmith. As I've said before, he is not a likeable or admirable central character. He is a ruthless liar and exploiter; and a coward whose only emotion is fear, and he only feels it when his own welfare is threatened. As a doctor, Collee was in the perfect place to do research for his story. It is quite a short book just 224 pages in the edition I have, see illustration, and I read it in a couple of days. Of course the most interesting element of the book for me was how it portrays the hospital porters so I paid special attention to the first couple of chapters, before Matthew Harris assumes the identity of Dr Simon Hennessey.
 
The fictional hospital where the story starts is called West Harwood. In the opening scene Matthew and Alec are waiting to transfer a patient from a ward and the former laments about how half of a hospital porter's life is waiting for other people. The narrative is in Matthew's first person. He and Alec place bets on what is wrong with the patient. This first glimpse of portering life, especially the dry humour, is quite accurate, although it's an exaggeration to say half our time is spent waiting for others; maybe twenty percent. However, in the next scene I read: "There's not much pleasure to be derived from endlessly transferring patients from ward to ward." Firstly, that is not the only role played by a HP and secondly, most people who expressed a preference said that they did find that duty enjoyable. I was even once told that by an obs and gynae consultant who had portered during his holidays from medical school for two months. "I'll never forget it." he said. "It's changed my life." Harris is a very observant man and during his aforementioned downtime, he watches the doctors and nurses at work, suturing wounds, inserting drips, changing dressings and the myriad of other medical tasks; and he begins to see doctors as "a pretty ordinary bunch" and that medicine was "ridiculously straightforward". This is a deluded judgement. Doctors and nurses have to train for years and continuously study hard to learn to do what they do. Experts always make things look easy to a layman. Harris and the real Simon Hennessey become acquaintances and Harris feels bitter envy towards him. When Hennessey dies Harris feels a "rush of pleasure". One thing psychopaths are acutely aware of is social status. This is why psychopaths cannot usually endure the HP life; it is too lowly and there are too many people above them. I have known at least once psycho in my own HPing career, but he did indeed soon leave portering to go "up the ladder!", albeit by a more conventional and lawful route than Harris. Harris is unwilling to get too close to his brother porters because "I'd be infected by their hopelessness." He notices how in the pubs near hospitals where the staff congregate (the West Harwood appears to have no social club), there is subconscious social segregation. The doctors and nurses crowd round each other in the lounge while the porters congregate by the dartboard. This is an accurate observation, but, unlike Harris, I never saw it as a bad thing. Alec is a more developed character in the book than he is in the film. He actually expresses some of the same sentiments I do: "We're a crucial part of the system, Matthew. We inject a bit of humour, a bit of goodwill. You can't put a price on that." Alec is actually a proud and dignified HP! Harris dismisses his friend's ideals with cold cynicism. "Any fool can wheel trolleys about." Not true; it takes a special kind of person to do that task well and stick to it. Harris scornfully rejects Alec's positivity, believing that it is nothing more than the false aggrandizement of menial labour that is characteristic of "the Scottish working class." He also refers to Alec as "a blundering Celtic oaf." Matthew is different to his brother porters in that his parents were quite middle class. You can tell that by the accent of the character in the movie. His mother ran a shop and his sister is a hotel manager in Hong Kong. His mother cannot "hide her disappointment in me." Harris considers himself a washout; but he is also, paradoxically, a snob. The plot of the book is more or less the same as the film, which you would expect seeing as John Collee adapted the script himself. There are a few deviations though; for example, Christine gets her own voice in the form of letters to a friend at the start of each chapter. Harris also first tries to kill Alec by running him over in a car, not pushing him off a cliff. The finale of the book is far more open-ended. There is a hint, on the very last page, that Matthew Harris is not going to get away with his chicanery after all. See: https://www.johncollee.com/novels.
 
Because the novel is a first person narration, it is difficult to grasp the author's own opinions on hospital portering. All we know is the derogatory attitude the Matthew Harris character feels towards us. The book portrays HP's in a manner that is equally patronizing and insulting; however I got the impression that this attitude might after all be an essential element of the theme rather than the author's personal derision. I feel far more well-disposed towards John Collee now I have read his original novel. Generally, my opinion of both the book and film is the same, but my feelings towards the story itself have mellowed slightly.
See here for more background: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2012/11/paper-mask-online.html.