Death in literature often appears as penance or as a catalyst for other action. It is a slightly uncomfortable experience, then, to delve into a book that puts death at its centre but refuses to take a stance on whether or not it is a bad thing.

Wayne Macauley’s eclectic new novel, Some Tests, tackles the topic of death in a surreal way. It begins benignly enough: Beth is an aged care worker, a mother, and a wife who one day feels slightly unwell. Yet the familiar trudge from home to GP to specialist slowly expands, as Beth unwittingly finds herself on an all-consuming odyssey of referrals. As the days pass, she is swallowed up by an increasingly confused web of medical professionals dotted throughout the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and the possibility of even simply returning home grows ever more distant.

At the centre of the novel is an interrogation of the evolving view of death in Australian culture.

“It’s the persistent companion of our life – the fact that we will die,” Macauley tells Guardian Australia. “I think we’ve gone into a historical phase where we prefer to shut death away from ourselves, that we institutionalise it.”

“The topic [of death] lends itself to something that is not so much social realist but something that deals with those interstitial spaces of existence – the bits in between,” Macauley says. “When it comes to a topic like this – the topic of the body, the fallibility of the body, the possibility of the body’s demise, and what might happen to the thing we call ‘the self’ afterwards – all those lend themselves to exploring things in a much more metaphoric, symbolic or allegoric way.”

In Some Tests, despite the vagueness of her symptoms and her own doubts about how severe her condition is, Beth nevertheless gets on the conveyor belt of referrals and tests, and is unable to decide when and if she should get off. It is this uncertainty that lies at the heart of Macauley’s motivation in writing the book.

“I suppose that maybe we’ve entered into a phase of denial of death because science is telling us we can deny it,” he says.

“I think to our detriment we push aside this idea that we are mortal. I think we are perhaps too easily seduced by new science to think that we can a) live longer, and b) necessarily live better. Looking at death as a reality – I don’t think it hurts us. I think it makes us better people.”

Macauley is quick to point out the novel is not a criticism of the medical profession; instead he is taking aim at the fact that now there are so many options available to both patients and doctors that it’s hard for anyone to find the correct path for them – if indeed there is a correct path.

“I think it has got complex in the sense that the chemistry between the doctor and patient has changed.” Macauley points to the fact that as medical science progresses, doctors have increasingly more tests available to them. Not only can patients be checked for the presence of specific conditions, but with more and more genetic markers being identified, future risk can now be assessed too.

But it’s not an exact science – and can too much information be a bad thing? Doctors have now become gatekeepers between what a patient wants to know and what they need to know, as well as needing to convey the difference between when a test is definitive or when it simply is an indicator of something that may or may not happen.

“I think doctors are finding themselves in an interesting position where the pressure is on them to test, to not let something through,” says Macauley.

Staying true to its own message, Some Tests doesn’t offer any concrete answers – instead encouraging us to think more deeply about our role in what happens, as Macauley says, “in between” life and death. Beth and the other patients who find themselves zig-zagging across Melbourne are mindlessly following instructions as a way to ignore their own mortality, and alleviate their own burden of responsibility and decision-making. Eventually, Beth’s hand is forced as she needs to decide whether to continue on the same path, or to accept that no matter how many tests she has, she may never have as much information as she’d like.

“I don’t think we should any less trust our doctors,” says Macauley. “But I suppose it’s time to start questioning in a big way, the medical profession included: what do all these tests do for us? And is the ultimate outcome for the human good?”

• Some Tests by Wayne Macauley is published by Text and available now