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The Spare Room

No denying it

Helen Garner
Canongate, 195pp, £12.99,

Alberto Manguel

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Alberto Manguel on Helen Garner's new novel

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 mirror-holder. 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.