In the 1870s when Jesuit poet (now there’s a combination) Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a parish priest, he was moved to

write the poem Felix Randall, after tending to a dying blacksmith over a number of months.

Felix Randall the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,

Who have watched this mould of a man, big-boned and hardy-

handsome

Pining, pining, til time when reason rambled in it and some four fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all

contended

Hopkins’ poem is a meditation on terminal illness coming from the perspective of a religious man in a religious age. Searching

for meaning, the optimistic priest sees in the illness that has reduced the powerful blacksmith a metaphor for creation,

resurrection, and the grandeur of God.

Helen Garner’s elegant and moving novel The Spare Room is, in a sense, a secular treatment of the same subject, and

while it does not have the neat theological tieing-of-loose-ends of Hopkins’ poem (a re-assuring confidence that deserted him

at times, allowing for the writing of those masterpieces knonw as the ‘terrible sonnets’), it has frankness, humour, and warmth

as its consolations. The Spare Room is concerned with the living as much as with the dying and the dead.

The novel opens with an apprehensive narrator, who like Garner is called Helen, preparing her spare room for the arrival of a terminally ill-friend Nicola. Over the course of the novel we see Nicola – like Felix Randall – reduced savagely by her

disease, though the focus of the novel is squarely placed on those that surround the dying woman. Before Nicola’s arrival,

setting the scene, Helen talks to a friend who poses one of the central themes of the book:

‘You work with cancer patients,’ I said. ‘Does this sound bad?’
He shrugged. ‘Pretty bad. Stage four.’
‘How

many stages are there?’
‘Four.’
The bowl was empty. I put down my fork. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
He put his hands

on the dog’s head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits.
‘Maybe that’s why she’s coming to stay.

Maybe she wants you to be the one.’
‘What one?’
‘The one to tell her she’s going to die.’

I’ve already mentioned that the novel is elegant, but it’s also unflinching in its gaze. It’s a story of unbearable aches and

pains, not all of which are borne by the ailing Nicola. Dying, in this novel, is painful and pain is infectious. Dying, in this

novel, is social. It’s a process that involves the carers as well as the cared-for, and Garner is both tender and critical of

both in her carefully worded prose.

It’s the social aspect of this novel that is one of the most interesting. Nicola, at the start of the book, is sent ‘home’ by

the medics, all agreed that there is nothing more that can be done to cure her. Where is home, though? It’s not the house in which

she has lived for most of her life, too isolated and inaccessible for her reduced body. It‘s not with her family, for she has none – the price paid for an independent life. Home, in this case, then, becomes where her friends are. But the

novel’s title is no accident – the spare room is where we put guests, and implicit in a guest’s contract is that their welcome

is total but limited by a reasonable amount of time (like fish or wet towels, after a while they stink). Her stay with the narrator is ostensibly to undergo a three week ‘alternative treatment’ (the novel is scathing in its criticism of these last hope cures).

This is a novel about how we die now – perhaps the greatest remaining taboo, and one that precious few contemporary literary

works choose to lift. The paradox, as discussed in Sally Cline’s excellent Lifting the Taboo – Women, Death and Dying, is

that while we all face certain death, there’s a lot less of it about these days than there was in Hopkins’ time. Death and the

dying have been removed from view, from homes and the living, brushed into the sterile and controlled conditions of hospitals and

hospices. A death rattle was once a sad but familiar noise recognised in the community, now it’s learned anew by isolated

groups. Helen repeatedly expresses how ill-equipped she is for the task of caring for this dying woman, and in doing so she’s

expressing a sentiment of our age. Stressing that point, the novel is full of references to the contemporary, ranging from

music and film through to the branded malls and stores that act as refuges, landmarks, and repositories in the Urban landscape.

Most novelists eschew such specific references for fear of diminishing the timelesness of their work – this is a novel though

that is battling to stay in the moment, to stay with the living.

This is all very worthy, but what makes the book more than just interesting is the rythmn of the writing, which manages to push

and pull the reader through the very troubled waters in which it sails, comforting and scolding in equal measure, perfectly

reflecting the narrative journey as Helen and Nicola confront and accomodate each other until acceptance and understanding can

come about. We move from snappy lines like this dialogue between Helen and her sister, ‘the religious one’:

‘Do you ever go to communion?’ she asked as she unchained her bike from the car park railing.
‘No. I can’t find

a church I can stand. I hate it when they‘re ponderous.’
‘Go to the Catholics, then. They really rip along’

Through to the tender, and brutal:

There was sweat in the night. There was pain in belly and shoulder [Surely Hopkins would recognise a fellow spirit

with those beautiful and deliberately dropped possesive adjectives]. Each time I heard her moving about I would enter her room, without

speaking. She tried to smile at me: she was pretending not to suffer. All she had to help her was the last of the day’s

Digesic. I brought water in the china jug with the pink hydrangea pattern, and poured it into my prettiest glasses: I drank

too, to keep her company. The intravenous vitamin C seemed to brutalise her spine: she could not hold herself erect. I nursed

her, stripping and bundling, breaking out new linen, refreshing her bed and refreshing it again. While I worked she sat in the

corner on the wooden chiar, with her head hanging forward and her long, bruised hands clasped in her lap.

At last she

fell into a proper sleep. I crawled back into my bed, and the house was still

Felix Randall the farrier is anointed during his illness, a symbolic marking which in its time was understood by all, by the

soon to be departed and by those that would be left behind. In our age, where – thankfully – most of us are free to choose

whether/what to believe, we have scant narrative support to fall back on for these life-changing events. Jim Crace, a

self-confessed North-Korean-style atheist spoke about his novel Being Dead as an attempt to create a narrative of

comfort for atheists in the face of death. I’ve no idea as to whether Helen Garner has any strong religious convictions, but

The Spare Room is as bold, brave, and honest as one could wish for in such a narrative.