Post
surgery blues
Zenga Longmore
TIME OUT OF MIND by Jane Lapotaire Virago, £16.99. pp. 303, ISBN 1860499775 The prospect of reviewing this book made me very nervous indeed. I had already heard chunks of Time out of Mind on the radio — it was chosen as Radio 4's book of the week — so I was familiar with the author's tendency to weep 'tears of fury, despair and desperation' when things did not go her way. To make things more awkward, I am a devoted fan of Jane Lapotaire. but Jane is a determined Spectator-hater. 'I read the right-wing diatribes of its right-wing contributors,' she hisses, 'with much despising on my part.' What if I did not like her book? Would my heroine regard a bad review as a sinister Tory conspiracy to make her cry?
Fortunately, my fears were baseless. Time out of Mind sweeps the reader along on a turbulent voyage around Jane's struggle 'back to life' after a brain haemorrhage. It is a Jean Rhysishly candid book, tortured and darkly funny.
Three years ago, Jane suffered from a burst middle cerebral artery aneurism. Luckily, the event did not occur in England but in France, a strange land where hospital patients are treated with kindness and compassion. Her life was saved. 'Nearly dying is the easy bit,' she observes, wryly.
She returns to England with her friend Ann, and a new, worrying personality. She has become quarrelsome, snappy and, above all, 'truthful'. (I must speak truthfully' is another way of saying. 'I must be unutterably offensive'). Although she is aware of her abnormal behaviour, her tragedy is she can do nothing about it. Rudeness to strangers and friends is described in pitiless detail, and few people, including Jane, can understand why she has become like this. One of the many surprises in the book is the way people respond to her. An English doctor refuses to issue her with a sick certificate, suggesting she is perfectly able to work — not as an actress but as a receptionist. Jane Lapotaire a receptionist! Murder in heaven! Surely, even a doctor should have more sense than casually to dismiss the career of so eminent an actress. Another senseless practitioner has no idea if there is a support group for people who have undergone brain surgery; it later transpires there is such a group in his own hospital. 'But as I am to learn many times in the coming months, the medical profession has clear demarcation lines. His surgeon's job ends at the operating-theatre door.' Jane bemoans the fact that while money is being lavished on constructing ever larger hospitals with fancy equipment, there are not enough doctors and nurses to treat the patients.
Help is at hand. Jane is finally treated by a private consultant who explains that a personality change featuring extreme rattiness is perfectly normal after a brain operation. She is gradually encouraged to find ways of coping with outrageous fortune's slings and arrows without becoming 'awash with rage'.
Jane exposes the good and bad in hospitals and humankind alike. We hear about her drunken, depressive mother who aban
doned her at the age of two months to a foster carer. She speaks with 'honesty' about the traumatic relationship she has with her son. I was riveted by her story. I read her book in great, thirsty gulps.
I predict some insightful film director will make a Cathy, Come Home-style documentary based on this painfully revealing account which will result in questions in Parliament and a radical reworking of the NHS. In the meantime, I would certainly suggest Time out of Mind becomes compulsory reading for medical students. And even if you've never planned on having a burst middle cerebral artery aneurism yourself. you will learn a lot from this remarkable book.
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