THE SPARE ROOM
By Helen Garner
Anansi, 195 pages $24.95
When my children were small, we posted, after much discussion, two house rules on our fridge:
1. Be kind.
2. When it's time to go, it's time to go.
The first rule was of course the distillation of every civilized virtue we had been nagging them about; the second was an attempt to conquer the truly miserable tantrums and clutchings that went on every time we tried to leave something they had been enjoying - a playground, a toy store, a friend's house.
The narrator of Helen Garner's new novel, The Spare Room, puts Rule 1 to work. She takes in her friend, Nicola, who has stage four cancer that has progressed from her bowel to everywhere, and looks after her during three weeks of last-chance alternative treatment in Melbourne. Unfortunately, Nicola is having trouble with Rule 2.
As is usual for Helen Garner, life has pushed itself into her fiction. The narrator is a divorced, aging writer named Helen, who lives in Melbourne, as Garner does, alone in a house next door to her daughter and grandchildren. Garner has talked about the novel's roots in her recent experience with a dying friend, and her clear prose illuminates the real, everyday world of her city. The border between Garner's fiction and memoir is no blurred, grey area; the story is planted firmly in her own earth, every detail of life glowing with the energy field of ordinary things, about which she writes so beautifully.
In Yackers, a book of interviews with Australian writers, Garner remembered despairing over her writing's domestic bent ("My God, my scope, it's so small, it's so small") while walking down the street, and seeing in a shop window a print of Van Gogh's celebrated Room at Arles: two chairs and a bed: "It's a painting of somebody's bedroom, their own bedroom. I found that very encouraging."
The portrait of this bedroom begins domestically enough, readied for her charming and beloved friend with fresh pink sheets and geraniums (and an ominous crash of broken mirror). When Nicola turns up at the Melbourne airport almost unrecognizable, staggering with pain, Helen copes. She has paced herself to get through the three weeks of hard physical work - changing sheets and washing, preparing special food, helping all night as Nicola goes through violent reactions - that is the ordinary effort required to keep an invalid comfortable. But as the visit wears on, and the torture of the outlandish treatments continues, worry and exhaustion are less taxing for Helen than the rage she finds building in herself.
It's this rage that heats the book and provides its difficult heart. Why do we get so angry with those we love and serve?
Denial of cancer and death has turned Nicola from a model of free-spirited grace into a manic fool, and it's not too strong to say that Helen comes to hate her for her self-delusion and oblivious demands. Even Nicola's niece, who comes for a two-day visit, has felt like killing her. "There's a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won't just go away. It can't, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It's in the air around her. Like static."
The static electrifies the pages of this brief, painful book. Pain is not often detailed so exactly in fiction, but the urgency of Helen's anger, grief and love for Nicola leaves no feeling that Garner the writer is exploiting the suffering of her friend.
