KEY POINTS:
Hel is a sixty-something writer living in Melbourne with her daughter and grandchildren next door and a circle of friends. One of those friends has announced that she is coming to stay for three weeks while she undergoes a course of alternative therapy for terminal cancer. Hel duly prepares her spare room and herself and awaits Nicola's arrival.
When Nicola does arrive, the friendship is placed under immediate strain. Hel can't bring herself to believe in the treatment, which involves the administration of huge doses of intravenous vitamin C and sitting for hours in a plastic tent with an electrode in each hand - an ozone sauna. The clinic is badly organised, with the supplicant sufferers forced to wait for hours for their consultations, and with bland fob-offs offered to complaints and inquiries. But Nicola endures it all, the violent shaking fits that she experiences after the vitamin C infusions, the bone-deep pain - which she is told is a sign "the toxins are tearing their way out of her body" - with a ghastly, indomitable smile.
A crisis looms, where Nicola's bubble of denial must be burst and she must confront the inevitable. The smile must, at all costs, be wiped off her face, for the sake of those who seek to comfort her and who are kept at arm's length by the false hope that Nicola fosters. And the inevitable must run its course.
It is, needless to say, an extraordinarily brave author who will tackle material such as this. It doesn't promise to be uplifting. Yet in the hands of a writer of Helen Garner's quality, it glows with humour and human warmth. It rings true, and of course, Garner is as well-known for her non-fiction as she is for her fiction. She has been a popular visitor to these shores, most recently promoting the excellent Joe Cirque's Consolation. The Spare Room is her first novel for 15 years and it treads a fine and intriguing line between truth and artifice. It is written from the first person, and the narrator shares a first name and certain biographical details with Garner, and it could well be that Garner is writing about something she knows at painful first-hand.
The language is as simple and direct as the story, without literary flourishes or curlicues, apart from a single passage where the narrative runs ahead into the future a little way, fast-forwarding through the remainder of the progression of Nicola's illness, before returning to the present.
It's a powerful statement about alternative medicine, the way it preys on the natural tendency of the human spirit to deny death. But above all, it's about friendship, and how necessary it is to help us live, even to help us die.
THE SPARE ROOM
By Helen Garner (Text $29.95)
