“You’re gifted, Alec.” Pete pushed his shoulders back and fidgeted with his blanket. “You’re a virtuoso with the knife. I’m not just saying that because you’re my mate. You’re the best surgeon I’ve ever seen.”
Alec is the main viewpoint character of The Stars That Govern Us. Bold and ambitious, yet deeply insecure and sensitive, Alec is a talented young surgeon and a complicated character, utterly dedicated to trying to save the lives of as many children as possible.
Alec’s Backstory.
An only child, Alec was born on 1 December 1925 in Perth, Western Australia. His father was an immigrant from Ios, Greece; his mother was born in Perth but was of Greek and Scottish descent. Alec’s father is a general surgeon and was educated at St. Andrews in Scotland before moving to Perth.
Alec’s mother died in childbirth shortly before his fifth birthday, and his father sent him to live with maternal relatives on a farm outside of Kojonup, a town approximately 160 miles south of Perth. Alec developed selective mutism and did not speak from the ages of five until seven, perhaps foreshadowing psychiatric problems later in life.
Otherwise, however, Alec had a happy childhood. His uncle is a successful breeder of Arabian horses, while his aunt is a school teacher. Despite the Great Depression, Alec grew up comfortably, although he was expected to work hard and pull his weight on the farm. He remains deeply attached to the horse his uncle gave him, a black Arabian mare named Jarrah. (Alec claims he wanted a black horse, like Alexander the Great’s famous Bucephalus, but he wanted a filly, and “Jarrah chose me as much as I chose her.”)
Even though Alec claims he always wanted to be a jockey, he followed in his father’s footsteps and decided to become a surgeon. He gained admittance to the University of Melbourne’s medical school, but, upon turning eighteen, he decided to leave after his first year to join the Royal Australian Navy. His brief combat career as a medic aboard Australia was punctuated by a kamikaze attack in October 1944 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Alec received the Distinguished Service Medal and was invalided out of the RAN due to third-degree burns to his feet. He returned to medical school in March 1945, placing him in the same class year as his best friend and future surgical partner, Peter O’Neill.
In December of 1945, at the end of his second year in medical school, Alec suffered a severe manic episode that required him to be hospitalized. This incident – and the terrible way he was treated by some of his classmates and upper-level members of the university administration – scarred Alec, leaving him paranoid about relapses and somewhat bitter towards those involved. It also ruined Alec’s relationship with his future in-laws.
No hospital wanted to take a chance on Alec after his breakdown, and he ended up at Perth’s Stirling University Hospital by default; it was the only medical center willing to take a chance on him.
In the Novel.
During the novel, Alec is 30-years old and has been recently appointed as Stirling’s director of pediatric congenital heart surgery. Outwardly, he is an incredibly gifted young man, slick with the scalpel but with excellent bedside manners, always with a trinket in his pocket for a sick child. He is married to the daughter of a literature professor at the University of Melbourne, Ravenna Rosalind (“Venna”), and has a five-year-old son named Ambrose Peter (“Brose”). Alec has a good relationship with his family but is usually absent from events.
Alec carries a definite chip on his shoulder, and underlying his actions is always a simmering desire to prove others wrong about dismissing him because of his mental illness. His dream was to work in a large hospital in the United States; he chafes working at a public hospital with limited funding in the most isolated city in the world, and it is ultimately the lack of alternatives that leads him to decide to build a heart-lung machine in the hospital basement.
Alec isn’t intended to always be likable throughout The Stars That Govern Us. He is a complicated character, one who can often behave in contradictory ways. He is sometimes overly sensitive, arrogant, jealous, and obsessive, and he plunges ahead with a surgery when he shouldn’t. Nevertheless, Alec is a good doctor with far more good qualities than bad, and he learns throughout the novel how to be a better friend and doctor.
One of Alec’s salient qualities is his sense of humor. He loves to tease Pete over his propensity for having so many daughters and over his “ridiculous” cat, a white Persian named Fluffy. Although the Serafeim family has no pets, Alec loves animals, especially horses and birds, and he is notably upset over the idea of testing on animals. He is not a vegetarian, but he prefers to only eat fish.
Alec loves literature and is well-read in the classics – perhaps not surprising given his “adopted” mother, Aunt Susan, was a schoolteacher, and he grew up in an era without television. Alec can easily quote Shakespeare and many famous poets like Tennyson or Keats, albeit he often puts his spin on the quote and is rarely correct word-for-word.
A natural athlete, Alec runs to keep his mental health symptoms in check, and he enjoys anything to do with water, including swimming and sailing. Alec owns a small sloop named Sphyrna. (Sphyrna is the name of the genus that includes hammerhead sharks.)
Physically, Alec is small and wiry, with olive skin and thick curly black hair. He is a sharp dresser, and he often worries about how he appears to others.
Five Fun Facts About Alec.
- Alec’s most prized possession is unquestionably Jarrah – a black Arabian mare he received as a seventh birthday gift from his aunt and uncle. Jarrah appears briefly in the novel and is a bit of a diva.
- Throughout the novel, Alec suffers from a combination of symptoms that are intended to be most consistent with obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar depression. An overlap between the disorders is common; about twenty percent of people with bipolar disorder also suffer from OCD.
- Alec is a “car guy.” Heart surgeons have to be mechanically oriented, and Alec loves working on his muscle car as a hobby.
- Alec’s full-name is Alexandros Vasilos Serafeim. Alec was named after Alexander the Great. He is not fond of being called Alexandros (although he detests being called Alexander even more), and professionally, he uses the name A.V. Serafeim.
- Alec isn’t based on anyone that I know or any specific historical figure – but the idea of a surgeon who loses his confidence and/or his desire to continue performing surgeries is loosely based on John Gibbon’s decision to give up doing surgeries with his bypass machine because of the human cost.
Who would I cast as Alec?
I would probably have cast Gregory Peck as Alec. There’s a bit of Atticus Finch about Alec, and I think Peck had the depth to play someone like Alec. (The only problem: Peck was way too tall!).