Takeaway, Tommy Hazard, book review: funny and disturbing semi-fiction from Hackney’s NHS frontline

Takeaway is written from the perspective of a cynical Hackney ambulance driver, Tommy Hazard. Photograph: Hackney Council

There were three reasons this small, scarlet volume appealed to me. I love Hackney, I am always interested in any seedy tales of a city’s underbelly, and for a long time I harboured the wrong-footed wish to be an ambulance driver (I’ve never even owned a provisional licence).

Takeaway is a collection of anecdotes from the perspective of Tommy Hazard, an ambulance driver working in Hackney. It jumps with a sparky energy.

In these days of NHS crises, the book surely has a wide appeal, as it succinctly narrates dozens of mishaps of normal people, including more relatable characters and those who ‘but for the grace of god…’

On the back of the pocket-sized Takeaway is a recommendation from the writer Benjamin Myers, aptly describing the book as Dickensian: the characters the narrator meets in London’s streets and homes are diverse, and often society’s ‘outcasts’.

We meet NHS users deserving and otherwise, from casualties of drink, drugs and sex to a schoolgirl who swallowed a pin.

The short anecdotes become heavier in tone toward the end with suicides and suffering, yet all the while the book retains a sense of humour.

So you go in there, there’s somebody lying on the sofa. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t breathe. I can’t walk.”
“Who opened the door?”
“I did.”

People who do this think they are the first to have pulled this trick, but we see it every day.

Little escapes the wily eye of the narrator, giving an ‘inside scoop’ or conspiratorial feeling to the book. This feeling made me clean forget about ‘fiction’ label on the front: Tommy Hazard is believable because he is not without his flaws, trying to skive off or handle a morning shift with a hangover.

At first, his hard-line approach to triaging calls as either time-wasting or futile reads as unsympathetic, even righteous, but you soon begin to feel just as weary.

Tommy Hazard is the collective pseudonym of Lewis Parker and another writer. Parker is a poet, and is behind the independent publisher Morbid Books. Alongside Takeaway, Morbid Books puts out the political/literary magazine periodical A VOID.

It is unsurprising then that Takeaway has a literary finesse, with its numbered lines recounting poetry or even Bible verses. The red cover and layout is homage to the German publisher Reclam. One of Lewis Parker’s favourite books is Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a haphazard collection of stories with themes of addiction and alienation in the USA (Takeaway contains an epigraph from Johnson).

Despite the ‘fiction’ labelling, and like Jesus’ Son, a lot of the stories told by Tommy Hazard actually did happen.

The book also points to a wider truth about the uniquely spirited borough of Hackney that residents might relate to. As Hazard recounts, misfortune doesn’t discriminate: “It’s got nothing to do with how wealthy the street is, white or black, it’s a kind of mystical thing, a madness that sets in.”

Takeaway by Tommy Hazard is published by Morbid Books. ISBN: 978-0995645028, RRP: £7.99