Doctor Lark

Bill Larkworthy
Mosaique Press: €24.85

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I will admit to being a bit of a memoir junkie. I’ll read about anyone if it looks like they’ve led an interesting life, and Doctor Lark is one of those people.

Bill Larkworthy’s career as a Royal Air Force doctor and highly respected gastroenterologist spanned decades and took him all over the world, but most notably to the Middle East.

After resigning his commission in the late 1970s, he accepted a position in a Riyadh hospital and it was here in Saudi Arabia that his real adventures began.

Despite the notoriously repressive Saudi regime, he clearly relished his time there and tales abound of colourful characters and patients, wonderful desert jaunts and his eternal relief not long after he arrived, at an abandoned day-trip to the dubiously named Chop Chop Square…

And even though his eventual departure from Riyadh was clearly terrifying and more than a trifle dramatic, Bill Larkworthy’s love affair with the Middle East then continued in Dubai.

There’s quite a lot of medical terminology as you might expect, but thanks to his considerable skills as a writer, he makes endoscopy sound fascinating – even to the medically uninitiated.

I for one found myself thoroughly and morbidly enthralled by his elaborate descriptions of severely ulcerated innards and their poor unfortunate owners.

Just because someone is clever and interesting doesn’t always mean they can write an enjoyable memoir (i.e. Hillary Clinton’s treacle wading effort…), but Bill Larkworthy certainly can and Doctor Lark is an often amusing and very readable treat.

Shelley Antscherl
books@dutchnews.nl