Anyway, if you feel like reading it, here is a brief review I wrote of The Surgeon's Tale:
The tipping point - A review of the story “A Surgeon’s Tale”, by J.P. Dixon
Regarding its theme, “A Surgeon’s Tale” is alluding to the literature of the Grand Guignol, the french 19th century horror theatre. Dixon consciously constructs this tie, by both referring to the Grand Guignol as well as meticulously describing a bleak neighborhood in London where an obscure theatrical venue for such acts aspires to maintain an audience of horror-enthusiasts.
Form-wise, the story is essentially written in a third-person limited narrative. We do get to read of how some other characters feel, but only in relation to the long narration by the protagonist, the surgeon Tobin. Tobin is addressing some of his colleagues, decades after the main events. The narration itself has the typical dynamic of first-person narrative, which in this case creates a very powerful effect, due to Tobin’s guilt about the part he played in the strange and sinister case of Paulette – the female actress in that out-of-the-way theater's macabre show.
As far as the personalities of those two are concerned we, again, see a very familiar, and potent, dynamic: Tobin is the observer, a scientifically-oriented personality who in the process gets more and more involved with the object he observes, up until he becomes the facilitator of Paulette’s final descend to annihilation. Paulette, on the other hand, is the centerpiece of the story, given she initiates the tragic events and seems to be happy to continue destroying herself. At this point, we should – of course – present what exactly it is that Paulette does in her show, and why she does indeed seem to be both a person and an object.
She was originally was hired by the theater's manager because of her lack of ability to feel any pain whatsoever, and consequently was paid for a while to – merely – sink needles inside her body, or make a few not so deep cuts. However, the popularity of her act waned, and the loss of interest by the public lead to a tipping point: One night, as the show was ending, someone from the audience yelled at Paulette that anyone could do what she does. Paulette – having already been relegated to the last supporting act – instinctively reacted... Using the knife in her hand, she chopped off one of her fingers, and then reproachfully asked the spectator if that too was something everyone could do. Her unexpected, gruesome, but perhaps more poignantly irreversible action, instantly caused a frenzy. Paulette had just acquired a loyal fan-base.
For nine more shows she could enjoy this effect, by cutting off the rest of her fingers. Then she had to decide what would come next.
Surgeon Tobin meets Paulette for the first time in a small pub. Already Paulette has lost large parts of her hands. Tobin at first assumes the girl had a series of terrible accidents, but later he visits the theatre during one of her shows and gets to see her fully amputate the last remnants of her hand. By that time, her legs already are partly gone as well. A discussion in her dressing room follows, and during their talk it is revealed that Paulette wishes to establish how much of her body she can lose without dying.
The final part of the story is certainly far less realistic. After Tobin finishes the amputation of both legs, he is implored by Paulette to try to take away a bit of her torso. A number of procedures follow. At some point Paulette is resembling the bust of a statue, but soon she requests more operations, and her face is erased as well. By the end she resembles a small box of flesh and has no ability to do anything other than breathe and – we are to assume – think. Briefly afterwards, Tobin discovers that the box of flesh is cold: Paulette has died.
I think that the story contains some very memorable images. A problem is that its final part doesn’t come across as convincing, and given that the writer was reliant on both historic and medical information to build up his narrative, I sense that the epilogue likely diminished the overall effectiveness of his work. Perhaps a fault was that Dixon attempted to present a great many focal points: apart from the core focus (Paulette’s progressive transformation into an amorphous bit of flesh), we also are told of Tobin’s erotic inclinations towards the girl (they even have sex just before Paulette’s genitals are removed), his ever-present aspirations to be a notable scientist (we are told that this is why he keeps operating on her, completing procedures which are surely unheard of) and, lastly, his guilt about his own role in the story. Those concurrent focal points are, in my view, not adequately examined:
Tobin feels remorse, yet we don’t read any elaboration; Tobin is proud of being a cutting-edge surgeon, but nothing becomes of his work and even the loss there is to be merely inferred, though analyzing it might have helped the final part of the story acquire a more believable tone.
In conclusion, I do think that the first part of the story was very elegantly crafted. There we had to follow Tobin in his quest to understand – first understand what exactly was happening to Paulette, then understand why she was doing this to herself. This first part concludes with his personal involvement in the last ever operation on the stage of the theatre of the macabre. The second, and final part, seems to be a fusion of unrealistic events and inferred shame. Tobin continues his work on Paulette, yet the reader is in a way, I feel, robbed of a much needed intervening passage where Tobin’s progression from an obsessed fan of Paulette to a sadistic enabler of her final destruction would have become available. Perhaps such a passage would satisfy another type of audience: not Tobin or the other fans in the Grand-Guignol-like theatre, not someone interested in observing the cut, but someone wishing to learn more about the tipping point...
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