Robin Cook’s Host tells the story of Carl Vandermeer, a healthy, successful young lawyer, who injures his knee during a basketball match and undergoes an operation at Mason-Dixon Medical Centre.
Robin Cook’s Host tells the story of Carl Vandermeer, a healthy, successful young lawyer, who injures his knee during a basketball match and undergoes an operation at Mason-Dixon Medical Centre. However, soon after the routine surgery, he is declared brain dead as he fails to regain consciousness. Carl’s girlfriend, Lynn Peirce, a fourth-year medical student at Mason-Dixon University, is devastated by this news. But at the same time, she believes something has gone awry and there is more than what meets the eye.
Together with her classmate and friend Michael Pender, she soon finds out that Carl is not the only patient who has faced such fate. There had been similar cases previously where patients coming for routine op had been diagnosed with sudden serious medical issue and eventually had ended up in a vegetative state. These brain dead people were then transferred to a facility — the Shapiro Institute — where they were maintained and monitored, without any financial burden to the patient’s family, thanks to the “philanthropy” of the Russian tycoon Boris Rusnak who has taken over the multinational Sidereal Pharmaceuticals, which has a controlling stake in Middleton Healthcare which runs a chain of hospitals, including the one attached to Lynn’s university.
What Lynn uncovers, however, is far more disturbing. Carl and other patients’ condition is being deliberately caused so that they can be moved to the Shapiro institute to produce a specific drug. The patients are being used as medical ‘incubators’ against their will.
The story line easily reminds one of Dr Paolo Macchiarini, who in 2011, attained world fame for completing the first synthetic trachea transplant using stem cells. However, it was later found that six of his eight patients reportedly died, and allegations ensued that the risky procedure had been carried out on at least one individual who had not, at the time, been critically ill.
Host mirrors the plot of Cook’s 1977’s Coma. As in his previous novel, Cook elucidates various medical/biotech ethical issues, while entertaining his readers with thriller-style stories. Having worked in hospitals himself, he shows how they are extraordinarily dangerous places and how the patient sometimes is not the centre of things; making money and raising profits is. “The hospitals are money mills in disguise.”
The book is a comment on the US health-care system where drug prices have been skyrocketing. Lynn tells Michael that her father died because he could not afford the medicine that would have cured him. Cook tactfully shows how escalating drug costs are interrelated to the corporate takeovers of the medical centres; how increasingly powerful has the medical-industrial complex become. The pharma companies “throw around the money” with their lobbyists. And as Cook writes, “By controlling the Congress, drug companies in general are enjoying legalised robbery of the American public.”
The hypocrisy of such companies comes out very well when Michael says, “They want people to think their motivation is for the public good when they are, in fact, poster boys for capitalism run amok...The reality is that they spend more money on advertising prescription drugs directly to the pubic than they spend on research.”
Cook, through the character to Michael Pender, portrays the life of a black man in a white community. The novel has instances where the author takes the reader into Michael’s past, where he was surrounded by drugs, gangs, and guns, where you are either kill someone or are killed. Cook shows how there still an amount of distrust between the people belonging to the two communities when Michael tells Lynn how white patients are always dubious about him. Lynn herself in fact is prejudiced at first when she is made Michael’s lab partner.
Host is Cook’s thirty-fourth book. And he does not at all disappoint the reader. The novel is divided in three ‘books’. The story is able to catch the reader’s interest in the prologue itself. The story does get a bit slower in the second book also the longest one. The third book has all the action, which are brutally intense. Those in the medical profession will be able to make more sense of the various jargons, like “laminar narcosis”, used by the author; though he has tried his best to break down and simplify every complex medical phenomenon. Host is definitely a page-turner.
