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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Compelling to read if difficult to admire

Reviewed by: Rory Runnells

8/02/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

The Spare Room
By Helen Garner
House of Anansi Press, 195 pages, $30

COMPELLING to read, but difficult, finally, to admire, here is a novel that cuts to the bone of what friendship comes to mean to two women, one struggling with dying, the other battling a caustic life.

Though styled as fiction, veteran Australian literary writer Helen Garner's The Spare Room, set in present-day Melbourne, reads as memoir, or a rant of despair, frustration and blackly comic rage.

The narrator, Helen, awaits her longtime friend, Nicola, who is in final stages of cancer, to her home for a short stay. One of Helen's friends, a doctor, suggests that Nicola has come to the best place for her to die. Not so.

Nicola has come for "alternative" treatment at the Theodore Institute. The novel, lean and sharp in its dialogue, and brutal in its detail of disease and human failings, becomes the struggle of Helen to free, in her opinion, Nicola from the institute, which is presented, through its unwholesome employees, as both sinister and buffoonish.

Helen is clearly on the side of mainstream medicine, and one must accept this; indeed there is no reason not to accept it, given the institute's failure to help Nicola physically, however good she might feel psychologically that huge doses of Vitamin C, for example, are killing tumours.

Eventually, after a bitter emotional battle, Helen brings Nicola around, enlisting support from Nicola's beloved niece and her fiancé, and sympathetic "real" doctors (as Helen describes one).

Nicola flies back to Sydney, goes into palliative care, while Helen leaves her at the airport, with the moving last thought of the book: "It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over."

This expresses what is best about the story, the underlying idea that all one can do is bear witness, no matter how tough the situation, to another human being in his or her struggle, echoing John Donne's remark that no man is an island, we are all part of the continent.

What's not to admire after a harrowing but ultimately enriching experience?

Garner does more with this simple story in under 200 pages than many authors do with complex narratives in lengthy novels. The problem is that the friendship of Helen and Nicola is assumed, not well-described, and ultimately not convincing.

The novel studiously avoids sentimentality, except when trying to convince the reader of this solid relationship. If Garner had gone into why it isn't as great a friendship as the narrator, Helen, thought or what Nicola imagined, the story might even have been stronger.

Instead we are left with a powerful general theme, as noted above, but not as an intense a personal connection with the characters. The hints toward this connection are there, for example Nicola is described as having "an enraging brightness" but not much else is offered.

One is willing to accept this long-term friendship, given the power of much of the book, but it isn't rendered. Also puzzling is Helen's insistence that she wants to restore the real Nicola, not the suffering creature with false hope.

That idea, however, which could be made to seem deeply ironic, with Helen really wanting to feel better about her own sense of loss or her anger about the Theodore Institute, is not only not developed, it seems to be thrown away.

What would rescuing the "real" Nicola mean in any case? Maybe this is the real Nicola; noble, battling and naive all at once. Helen, the narrator we go by, doesn't seem to quite get it, and there is a disconnect between what we read, and are supposed to believe.

The Spare Room delivers a punch with its strong theme and narrative, but not a knockout blow in its characters and motivations. Still, it is not to be missed.

Rory Runnells is executive director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2009 D5

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