Prologue Summary
Opening
From the vantage of fifty, Marion Praise Stone looks back to the day he and his twin are born in Addis Ababa and to the absence that defines them: a mother who dies, a father who vanishes, and a hospital that bears a typo for a name. In returning to the room where his life begins, he decides to cut into the past the way he cuts into a body—to locate the wound that divides him from his brother and try, finally, to repair it.
What Happens
The story opens in Operating Theater 3 of Missing Hospital—“mission” misprinted into “missing”—a place cultivated by the serene authority of Matron Hirst into something like Eden. Here, on September 20, 1954, Marion and his identical twin Shiva Praise Stone enter the world. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a Carmelite nun whose devotion defines the hospital, labors in silence while the autoclave screams beside her. She dies in childbirth. Their father, the brilliant surgeon Thomas Stone, runs from the scene and from his sons.
As a child, Marion sneaks into Sister Mary Joseph Praise’s small sanctuary by the autoclave: a desk, an old cardigan he pulls around himself like a relic, and a calendar image of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The angel’s arrow piercing the saint becomes his first and only picture of a mother—holy ardor reframed as embodied rapture. The image fuses medicine and mysticism in his mind; he comes to believe “the metaphors of her faith” are also the metaphors of surgery, where the sacred resides under skin and rib.
Now a surgeon himself, Marion stands again in that room. He does not see himself as a natural prodigy or showman; he works steady, cautious, and faithful to Stone’s “Eleventh Commandment”: never operate on the day of a patient’s death. He follows Matron Hirst’s counsel to choose the hardest path and to find his “Gloria,” the work only he can do. Yet the reason he tells this story is not triumph but debt—a profound obligation to Shiva and a “wound” between them that skill cannot close. Where the scalpel fails, narrative may heal.
Character Development
In a single, concentrated frame—the birth, the loss, the room—each central figure emerges with defining contours that will shape the novel’s arc.
- Marion Praise Stone: Reflective, precise, and morally serious, he embraces surgery as vocation and metaphor. He narrates to mend identity, grief, and a fracture with his twin that clinical work cannot fix.
- Shiva Praise Stone: Marion’s mirror and mystery—preternaturally gifted, unsentimental, a mind attuned to “fixing holes.” His presence defines Marion’s purpose; their divide defines Marion’s pain.
- Sister Mary Joseph Praise: Saintly and inscrutable, a nun whose death in childbirth leaves a sacred absence. The St. Teresa image becomes her emblem—ecstasy, pain, and devotion in one body.
- Thomas Stone: A legendary surgeon whose principle bespeaks humility and restraint, yet whose flight marks him as wounded and wounding—brilliant in the theater, absent in the family.
- Matron Hirst: The hospital’s mind and heart; she tends gardens and people with equal wisdom, naming Marion’s calling and pushing him toward the difficult good.
Themes & Symbols
Medicine arrives not as trade but calling: Medicine as a Calling and a Metaphor. Marion seeks to “heal myself” through the discipline’s steadiness, while surgery’s language—incision, repair, suture—translates the emotional work of facing loss. The prologue also anchors Family, Identity, and Belonging: orphaned twins, a missing father, and a country that shapes them. Brotherhood and Rivalry pulses beneath every line; the twins’ bond is primal and broken, the novel’s emotional engine. With The Weight of the Past and Secrets, the narrative insists that only by cutting into the old wound—the hidden story of the parents—can the living body of the present be saved. Place matters too: Exile and Homeland frames a life lived between continents, where “geography is destiny” and home is both cradle and scar.
Symbols gather quietly in the room of Marion’s making:
- Missing Hospital: A typo becomes a thesis—what’s absent defines what remains.
- The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: Body and spirit meet at the point of the blade; pain and rapture are twins.
- “The hole”: Shiva’s credo—literal defects to repair, and the emptiness in a life that demands closure.
Key Quotes
“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”
This credo sets the novel’s retrospective design. Understanding demands a clinical autopsy of the past; the shock of discovery—what we’ve run over without knowing—supplies both guilt and clarity.
“Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”
Thomas Stone’s “Eleventh Commandment” establishes ethical restraint and mortality’s boundary. It tempers surgical bravado with humility, a rule Marion internalizes as safeguard against hubris.
“The metaphors of her faith were also the metaphors of medicine.”
Marion entwines sacrament and scalpel, locating holiness in the body’s repair. The line turns his mother’s devotion into his doctrine, justifying surgery as spiritual labor.
“Ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle.”
For Marion, anatomy is a liturgy: the everyday work of keeping life intact. The phrase elevates technical skill into wonder while foreshadowing the novel’s faith in small salvations.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The prologue lays the novel’s contract: who the players are, where the wound lies, and what kind of healing is possible. It roots the saga in Ethiopia, links family mystery to medical craft, and sets Marion’s voice—lyrical, precise, haunted—as our guide. By placing birth, death, and flight in one room, it frames the story as a long operation on memory itself, promising a search for truth that is both diagnosis and cure.