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At the center of John Berger's novel is not a murder, but a killer: When a policeman is killed in a bank robbery, Jack House, the alleged “cop killer”, is arrested, but he is so badly wounded that it is thought he may die before he is tried and hanged. He is therefore taken to the nearest hospital in the middle of the night and, under police supervision, is placed in an ordinary ward for six patients, young and old, poor and rich, religious and modern.
Clive's Ward is a fascinating portrait of British society at an interesting point in its history - after the Second World War but before the dizzying pop-consumerism boom of the sixties. In fact, the setting of the novel - a hospital ward with its nurses, doctors and underpaid orderlies, its unseen but omnipresent 'Authority' and, most importantly, its six patients - is itself a snapshot of British society. What makes this hospital story unique is not so much the illnesses and treatments, but what people see in the mirrors of those they encounter. Clive's Ward is a picture of a rigid and conformist culture, whose conventions of right and wrong, of class and morality, cannot be questioned or challenged until they are broken by someone who questions them in a fundamental way: And that person is the embodiment of all that is anti-social and uncivilized: A murderer.
Clive's Ward is a fascinating portrait of British society at an interesting point in its history - after the Second World War but before the dizzying pop-consumerism boom of the sixties. In fact, the setting of the novel - a hospital ward with its nurses, doctors and underpaid orderlies, its unseen but omnipresent 'Authority' and, most importantly, its six patients - is itself a snapshot of British society. What makes this hospital story unique is not so much the illnesses and treatments, but what people see in the mirrors of those they encounter. Clive's Ward is a picture of a rigid and conformist culture, whose conventions of right and wrong, of class and morality, cannot be questioned or challenged until they are broken by someone who questions them in a fundamental way: And that person is the embodiment of all that is anti-social and uncivilized: A murderer