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Sunday 7 September 2008

No denying it

Alberto Manguel on Helen Garner's new novel

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 functions 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’.

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