No denying it
Alberto Manguel
THE SPARE ROOM by Helen Garner Canongate, £12.99, pp. 195, ISBN 9781847672650 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Montaigne wished for a library of deathbed chronicles. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote, ‘I would assemble an annotated registry of various kinds of dying.’ Such a collection exists. Its ancestors are the ars moriendi of the Middle Ages and its modern manifestations bear uplifting titles such as The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion or Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes. Part chronicles of a leavetaking, part philosophical handbooks, part cautionary tales and part memoirs, these books belong to a necessary genre that func tions as a mirror for us to see the skull as our common face. At their best, they make for joyful reading.
Helen Garner’s The Spare Room is the latest addition to Montaigne’s library. Blending reportage and fiction, The Spare Room is the lucid, compassionate account of a woman’s struggle against the inevitability of death. Nicola, an old friend dying of cancer, comes to stay with Helen in her house in Melbourne, in order to undergo yet another unconventional treatment at the clinic of a mysterious Professor Theodore who (for a hefty sum) promises salvation. Nicola is a child of the Sixties culture, a believer in auras and self-healing and most forms of alternative medicine. She accepts every proposed cure, however incongruous: peroxide drips, massive doses of vitamin C mixed with something called glutathione, essence of cabbage juice, dollops of aloe vera, ozone saunas, crushed apricot kernels, coffee enemas and even having her molars pulled out. What Nicola won’t accept is that she’s reached the terminal stage of the illness and that soon she’s going to die. She won’t even agree to palliative care because, she explains, ‘it’s the last thing before death’.
As Helen quickly realises, Nicola’s arrival is not simply that of an old sick friend coming to occupy ‘the spare room’. Together with Nicola comes the memory of their common past, of its half-recalled joys and misfortunes, and its attendant feelings of guilt and regret, of paybacks and acts of contrition. Like the haunted moment between wakefulness and sleep, the presence of death in her house brings in its wake thoughts of misery, both private and cosmic, ‘its rules pushing new life away with terrible force’, making Helen long for ‘the children next door, their small, determined bodies through which vitality surged’. The image of death conjures up its contrary.
But there is no escape from its tangible reality. By the fact of Nicola’s presence, Helen is forced to live out Montaigne’s wish ‘that my every third thought be death’, leading her to reflect, in an eloquent, wise, perfectly pitched voice, on our common, unstoppable fate. ‘Death,’ writes Garner, ‘will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.’ Wondering, halfway through the book, why Nicola has chosen to come to Melbourne, a friend of Helen suggests that maybe she wants Helen ‘to be the one’. ‘What one?’ she asks. ‘The one to tell her she’s going to die.’ That is, of course, the role assigned to her which she very reluctantly accepts: the one of mirrorholder. It is an honoured position, as the epigraph by Elizabeth Jolley makes clear: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’ Never sentimental, never facile in her observation of grief, Garner reminds us, almost as an aside, of the consolation that religion might offer, not in the promise of a life to come but in the universal sharing of pain. Exhausted from the ordeal, Helen asks her sister Lucy (‘the religious one’) to bless her. Lucy agrees. ‘Sometimes,’ she answers, ‘there’s only one prayer to say. Lamb of God. You take away the sin of the world.’ The injunction that follows, ‘take pity on us’, is left unsaid. To do so, as Garner knows, would be redundant.
This slim, taut, loving book, steeped in pity and respect for someone learning to accept her own death and to assume authority over it (as the ars moriendi recommends) says it for her.
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