We can get to the review in a second, but first things first: why have I suddenly got a multitude of hits from someone searching for various permutations of “real human skull” on Google or Yahoo?! Can anyone explain? It’s freaking me out slightly.
Anyway, back to normal service:
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Nicola has stage 4 cancer and wants to come to Melbourne to spend three weeks seeing a therapist who promises to cure her with vitamin C drips and ozone cupping, so she goes to her old friend Helen for help. Helen is only too happy to take care of Nicola but is surprised at how frail she has become and at her unwillingness to face the reality of her disease, refusing pallative care and opiates in the face of extreme pain. Helen struggles to care for her friend’s physical issues whilst gently encouraging her to see the quacks for who they are.
This is a very slight book. Not in terms of the plot, oh no, but in terms of size. It’s only 198 pages long, with big margins and a big font. Definitely the sort of book I’d want to read and then see it cost £7.99 and think how much? for that?! I just resent paying a penny per word, I guess. Which is why I’m happy to have got this book out of the library! And whilst it’s certainly spartan – it is probably the length of a NaNoWriMo novel, all told – it does a lot with those few words.
I discovered this book on the Guardian’s list of The Best Unread Books Of The Decade and reserved several of them at the library. This one was picked up first from the pile not because I thought it would be the best or because I even remembered what it would be about (death! Again! I need to start reading about something else…) but because it was late at night and I wanted to read something that I could get into quickly. I figured that if the book was so slender, 30-40 pages would be a significant chunk and I would finish it off fairly easily the next day. Well, that and I couldn’t reserve Jasper Fforde’s latest until I picked up some of my other reservations, so I needed to finish reading at least 1 library book in a hurry… Anyway, I read just over half of it in 45 minutes and was loathe to put it down, despite knowing that I really needed to get some sleep or I’d suffer at work the next morning.
It might be short, but it truly is beautifully written. The details leap out of the page, as Helen becomes more distressed by her friend’s illness she focuses more on the beauty around her, noticing the red hue of a pot or the smell of coffee haunting the house after an evening of attempts at coffee enemas. What’s most affecting is the reality of the situation, you can’t help but feel that Garner has seen firsthand the effects of Stage IV cancer and the desperation with which some sufferers will cling to any hope, no matter how farfetched (“The vitamin C sort of scoops the cancer cells out of your body.” I hope that if I’m ever in that situation, I don’t place my hopes in the hands of an “expert” who uses the words sort of to describe the treatment).
I finished reading it squashed between the sofa and the radiator (in an effort to stay warm, tis freezing at the moment!), moved almost to tears by the strength and love in the relationship between Helen and Nicola. I’m lucky enough to have never witnessed a person being taken over by cancer up close but I hope that if I am ever in that situation, I deal with it with just a fraction of the grace, poise and humour that these two women display. It’s tough to decide whether the more affecting passages are those in which Helen is frustrated and furious with Nicola’s treatment by her sham doctors (and by Nicola’s complete acceptance of it) or those in which she deals with the physical effects of the cancer without a complaint crossing her mind.
It may sound strange to say, but I really enjoyed this book. It was beautiful, haunting and elegiac, the prose was spartan but held such a variety of emotions from page to page. It may be slim but it’s worth reading – and buying, so you can read it again and again.
