Who Cares

About the Book

Jacobs is a young man in search of meaning. He finds himself working as an orderly in a home for the disabled. He also feels curiously drawn to institutionalised life after a childhood in boarding-schools. However, his middle-class ideals are slowly eroded by the realities of hard work, routine chores and the crude pragmatism of his colleagues at the home. His passionate empathy for the residents alienates him even further from the staff, one of whom, a disbarred male nurse, obsessed with the pursuit of mystical knowledge, is rumoured to have a suspect background, causing some of the residents to be afraid for their lives.

Jacobs emerges from his journey wiser but ultimately defeated and eventually traumatized by the concluding revelation.

Concentrated within a period of some three weeks, a domino-effect of calamities culminates in the sudden deaths of four people at the home.

The interaction between the naïve Jacobs, the colourful residents trapped in institutionalised routine, and the motley crew of unhappy, troubled and eccentric staff members, provides the strong undercurrent of grim humour bubbling throughout the novel.

In his search for meaning, and even for the meaning of caring, the injustice and brutality of nature and of life is hammered home to him. The search also leads Jacobs into a revealing attempt to reach a deceased resident by private séance.

The deployment of resonance and variations in style accentuate the interdependence of life and death, the juxtaposition of the unexamined and the examined life, life lived and life reflected, and the dilemma of the self-conscious human, staring up into the abyss, albeit in awe, for an answer.

About the Author

Oliver Gregory lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.

WHO CARES is his first published novel.