Father Michael's Lottery

August 6, 2007
Steyn's fine South African import debut deals with the ravages of the “big disease” and bottom-line–oriented health care in southern Africa. Protagonist Dr. John Morgan toils at a remote hospital in an unnamed southern African country at the dawn of the 21st century. Retroviral drugs are prohibitively expensive, and a cynical but bighearted Morgan is constantly at odds with his boss, Superintendent Holmes, a typically penny-pinching, arrogant hospital administrator. Morgan's ragtag team of surgeons perseveres in the most deplorable conditions, dealing in doses of gallows humor to leaven the strife the staff and dying patients face. Mr. B, a well-connected and sympathetic businessman, organizes a massive fund-raising “beerfest” and gives Morgan the proceeds, but even this “large sum” can only cover two years' worth of drugs for six patients. Enter Father Michael, the local priest for more than three decades, who offers Morgan some down-to-earth counsel and proposes a lottery to determine who of the suffering scores gets treated. By turns tragic, startling and humane, Steyn's medical epic dramatizes how poverty-stricken people struggle in a harsh land with a harsher disease.