If you could shed your worst traits, would you? If you were an anxious person, would you create a separate being to carry your worries for you? Or if there were parts of yourself that you found shameful, would you cut them out of your personality? In The Two Doctors Górski, Isaac Fellman creates an alternate version of our world where that is possible, at least if you’re a powerful enough magician and have a detailed enough knowledge of the human brain. After reading this novella, I think that I will keep my flaws and faults. They’re part of what makes me (and us) who we are.
Annae Hofstader is a newly arrived PhD student at a small British university when we meet her. She has been ignominiously dismissed from her studies in the United States after her efforts to remove fear from rats’ brains fails to pan out and her supervisor/lover cuts her loose. That supervisor badmouthed Annae so much that she can only be accepted into Marec Górski’s program; no one else will have her. But Górski is notoriously misanthropic. He’s also famous for being one of the few people to successfully create a homunculus, an idea that intrigues Annae because of her work on rat and human amygdalae, the parts of our brains that warn us of environmental dangers, help create memories, modulate emotions, and other things that we don’t quite understand. In Annae’s world, homunculi are created out of the traits that magicians want to get rid of. The first homunculus we learn of, for example, was created because a Victorian magician was so deeply ashamed of his homosexual attractions that he made an entirely new person to carry those attractions. But what we—and Annae—quickly learn about homunculi end up with a lot more of ourselves than we realize through the tragic and violent example of Marec Górski and his gentle but incomplete homunculus, Ariel Górski.
This slight, but deeply thoughtful, story fascinated me. I am an anxious person. I have my flaws. Friends and family know to limit me when the topics of language and medical history come up because I can be very pedantic. But I’ve learned over the years that my anxiety (when properly managed) keeps me on my toes. It helps my brain run on extra cylinders when I’m working with students who are researching every topic under the sun. My pedantic tendencies help, too, because they make me curious about a lot of different things and help me retain what I glean from what I read. When Annae accidentally removes another person’s anxiety during a high-stress panic attack, she shows us that we need at least a little part of our brain turning in little worried circles. It stops us from being psychopaths.
Even though this book is presented as a story about magicians and homunculi, The Two Doctors Górski turned into an insightful (and gripping!) psychological drama. I inhaled it, readers, and think anyone who likes a dose of fantasy with their drama (or drama to deepen their fantasy) will enjoy this one, too.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.