In early 2012, feeling braver, I picked up the audiobook of Room at the library, thinking that I would give it a chance.

Listening to the opening chapter was a revelation. The actors who read this book are remarkable — in particular, Michal Friedman, who reads the part of five-year-old Jack, who was born in Room, where his Ma has spent the last six years of her life enduring the visits of the man who snatched her off the street when she was a nineteen-year-old student. Jack is smart and happy and full of curiosity, since the life he knows is full of interest and new things. Ma has created an ordered routine that makes sense of their days. She does her best to teach Jack about the world while maintaining the fiction that they and the man (“Old Nick”) are real and everything else is “TV.” They have a television, but Jack’s watching time is limited, since Ma tells him that if they watch too much their brains will rot. She is a survivor and she is waiting and biding her time for some future possibility of escape. Donoghue lets the reality of their situation dawn gradually and I envy readers who came to Room before the elements of the story became widely known.

Jack’s voice is convincing — the voice of a five-year-old who is at the same time precocious and observant but necessarily limited in his understanding:

Spider’s real. I’ve seen her two times. I look for her now but there’s only a web between Table’s leg and her flat. Tables balances good. that’s pretty tricky, when I go on one leg, I can do it for ages but then I always fall over. I don’t tell Ma about Spider. She brushes webs away, she says they’re dirty, but they look like extra thin silver to me …

I still don’t tell her about the web. It’s weird to have something that’s mine-not-Ma’s. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I’m kind of hers. Also, when I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jump into our other’s head, like colouring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green …

Ma’s down on her knees, looking under Table. I can’t see her face till she pushes her hair behind her ear. “Tell you what, I’ll leave it till we clean, OK?”

That’s Tuesday, that’s three days. “OK.”

“You know what?” She stands up. “We’ve got to mark how tall you are, now you’re five.”

I jump way in the air.

Usually, I’m not allowed draw on any bits of Room or furnitures. When I was two, I scribbled on the leg of Bed, her one near Wardrobe, so whenever we’re cleaning up, Ma taps the scribble and says,”Look, we have to live with that forever.”  But my birthday tall is different, it’s tiny numbers beside Door, a black 4, and a black 3 underneath, and a red 2 that was the color our old Pen was until he ran out, and at the bottom a red 1.

The eponymous Room is a garden shed. Old Nick has reinforced it to make it soundproof and added a steel door with a coded entry lock: you come to the chilling realization that he must have created this above-ground dungeon while making plans to abduct someone. Their only natural light comes from a skylight.

The horror behind the bright little voice is a steady presence in the background. Jack knows that Old Nick is to be avoided: he sleeps in the wardrobe and has to keep quiet if he is still awake when the man comes in, his arrival heralded by the beeps of the door lock. Nick sometimes hurts his Ma but usually he just creaks the bed. Jack lies awake and counts the creaks.

Ma takes painkillers (“killers,” to Jack) to deal with physical ailments like toothache and a damaged wrist, and perhaps also to dull other kinds of pain.

Around Jack’s fifth birthday, Ma learns from Nick that he has lost his job. Since he already keeps them on a tight budget, she fears that he will stop bringing them food and other necessities. He may even lose his house, and then they will die: they have no way of contacting anyone in the outside world. Jack is too young to learn the truth about their lives, but there is no option: she has to come up with a plan and drill Jack into playing a part he is not really ready for.

The second half of the book is about life on the outside. You might think it would be anticlimactic, but no: it’s equally compelling. Much of the outside story reflects the imperfection of person-to-person communication, made more striking by the gulf between the normal world and the world Jack and Ma have lived in. Well-meaning medical staff and relatives find that their ideas and language fall short of what is needed. Ma is hostile and defensive; Jack can’t bear to be parted from her, because she is his world. The outside is not at this stage a paradise: it is strange and difficult.

Jack’s learning about the world is poignant and often funny. He has never worn shoes; he has not been socialized to think in terms of what the world thinks is appropriate behaviour for a five-year-old boy. His relating of what other people say and do points out absurdities in a delicious way, like an anthropologist describing the mores of a newly discovered society:

“Maybe one that’s not pink?” says Paul to her. “What about this one, Jack, pretty cool or what?” He’s holding up a bag of Spiderman. I give Dora a big hug. I think she whispers, “Hola, Jack.” Deanne tries to take the Dora bag but I won’t let her. “It’s OK, I just have to pay the lady. You’ll get it back in two seconds.”

It’s not two seconds. It’s 37.

Ma’s reintroduction is much harder. She is angry and she makes mistakes. In the audiobook, we hear Ma’s voice (and others’ voices), though only when Jack is present. A lot of what we pick up is through Jack: “Ma twists her mouth,” “Ma puffs out her breath,” “Ma is mad.”

The actors are stellar. Michal Friedman* as Jack is flawless. Ellen Archer is Ma;  Suzanne Toren and Robert Petkoff play a whole cast of characters, from Nick to Doctor Clay, Officer Oh to Nurse Noreen, Grandma and Real Grandpa and Stepa, and more. In hindsight, I wish I’d read the book and then listened to the audiobook: there’s not much point in doing things the other way around as the audio interpretation would override the reading experience.

Room was a significant literary success: winner of the 2010 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize among other prizes and a finalist for the Booker. Those successes are entirely deserved. Emma Donoghue has taken on a monster and she gives us glimpses of the evil that lies in the background but, by telling the story from Jack’s perspective, she focuses primarily on the relationship between mother and child and the absurdities of human behaviour.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

Thus begins Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a compellingly readable book about ageing, mortality and the big questions: a book that is, oddly enough, entertaining. Gazing into the void is not alarming with Barnes as my companion. It doesn’t hurt that his British childhood memories have a lot in common with my own: television was The Brains Trust, Armand and Michaela Denis, “David Attenborough panting through the undergrowth.” But, regardless of which set of memories we have in common, all over the world my contemporaries are arriving at the same stage: recognizing that the time remaining is finite. Many of us have no expectation of an afterlife. Do we need to make sense of the life lived, the wisdom acquired? Do we need to think  about what happens after lights out?

There is more than the usual amount of debate for and against religious belief at present, with what’s at stake ranging from the life-threatening (the rise of religious fundamentalism that becomes a murderous hatred of others) to the minutiae of etiquette and hypersensitivity to perceived slights. In Britain, the U.S. and Canada, this time of year tends to bring out a lot of fretting about the dominant culture imposing Christmas on non-Christians and bureaucracies wishing everyone a sanitized Happy Holidays, believers holding forth on the “real meaning of Christmas,” others reminding us of the pagan origins of the tree and gift-giving, on and on.

This December in particular the death of Christopher Hitchens, who wrote and spoke passionately about his atheism, seems to have increased the number of words on the subject. He, of course, had a talent for the incisive summing up:

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

At least in historical terms, this doesn’t allow much room for argument. But in my lifetime I have seen a lot of good coming out of organized religion, in spite of its imperfections.  A less hostile but, to me, less debatable statement from Hitch:

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Barnes’ variation: “My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity — or their opposites.”

I have, I suppose, been a non-believer since I was 15. Suddenly, all the traditions in which I’d been brought up seemed so unlikely that it was a relief to drop it all — especially the idea of having continuing awareness for eternity, which was a terrifying concept that kept me awake in the middle of the night, dreaming of an endless whirling repetition of something unimaginable.

The things I have missed in my godless existence are the rather attractive trappings of sacredness: glorious hymn-singing, ancient churches, moral certainty, the poetry of the Bible, Jesuitical debates on fine questions of conscience. Pascal Mercier, in Night Train to Lisbon, describes a fine list of pros and cons:

REVERENCE AND LOATHING FOR THE WORD OF GOD
I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need them against the vulgarity of the world. … I want to let myself be wrapped in the austere coolness of the churches. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men …

But there is also another world I don’t want to live in: the world where the body and independent thought are disparaged, and the best things we can experience are denounced as sins …

I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty.

I have the same sort of mixed emotions, though Barnes provides a needed cold water dose of realism that cuts through all this sentimentality:

… my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion); and the God I don’t believe in yet miss is naturally the Christian God of Western Europe and non-fundamentalist America … I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm … I realize that this God I am missing, this inspirer of artworks, will seem to some just as much an irrelevant self-indulgence as the much-claimed “own personal idea of God” … Further, if any God did exist, He might very well find such decorative celebration of His existence both trivial and vainglorious, a matter for divine indifference if not retribution. He might think Fra Angelico cutesy, and Gothic cathedrals blustering attempts to impress Him by a creation which had quite failed to guess how He preferred to be worshipped.

Barnes likes shades of grey. He has courtesy and a lightness of touch along with his inquiring mind and sense of humour. These qualities make him the ideal companion on this journey. He looks at many aspects of ageing and death as well as the afterlife question and brings personal anecdote into every facet of this one-way trip we’re all on. The book provides easily a year’s worth of topics for discussion among people of a certain age.

• Still waiting. They say it’s a technical thing. No, not what you want to hear.
• And some lady got sick.
• Yeah … right.
• Yeah, it’s like that movie, what’s it … No, you don’t want to be here.
• I think we should get off now, while we still can.

Conversation 2, in the doctor’s waiting room

• I’ve got these bites all over my body. Yes, red bites all over … very itchy. I can’t stop scratching.
• No, I don’t think they’re bedbugs.
• No, not lice … that would be on my head, wouldn’t it?
• All over my neck and my legs and my breast, my chest, you know. And my back. Red, insect bites, I think, and they itch something fierce.

Conversation 3

• Hello Poppa. I SAID, HELLO POPPA.
• Did you enjoy the game? I SAID, DID YOU ENJOY THE MANCHESTER UNITED GAME?
• The MANCHESTER UNITED GAME?
• Did you enjoy THE MANCHESTER UNITED GAME?
• Why don’t you put Momma on.

The story is told from the point of view of Ora, wife of Ilan, mother of two boys, Adam and Ofer, and friend/lover to Avram.  Yes, Ora is described in other ways but her relationships to these four men are the essence of the book. Motherhood is the central fact of her life. Grossman conveys the joy and pain that is part of having children anywhere, and also the constant fear that goes with being a parent in a perpetual war zone. When Ofer volunteers for an additional twenty-eight day tour of duty after he has completed his normal period of military service, it is the fear that the “notifiers” will come to give her terrible news that causes Ora to decide to go on an extended hike along the Israel Trail. If she is not at home, she cannot receive the news and somehow in her mind the worst cannot happen.

Ora takes as her travelling companion the book’s most fascinating character, Avram,  teenage friend of Ora and Ilan, sometime lover of Ora, and father of Ofer. In his earlier life, Avram is an artist with a brilliant, offbeat mind and a way with language and ideas that is a constant delight. His history includes a period of torture and near-death as a prisoner of war. The grim details of his torture define inhumanity and have permanently damaged him.

As they walk, Ora tells Avram about the life of his son, Ofer, whom he has never known. She tells him about the birth, about the early years, and his adolescence. She also tells him about her other son, Adam, and about her life with Ilan (from whom she is now estranged). At the  beginning, Avram is inarticulate, willing to walk but not keen on talking. But Ora persists in telling him about Ofer and eventually she breaks through Avram’s protective shell and he participates.

The centre of the book is about the long, rambling walk when Ora tells Avram the smallest details about Ofer’s childhood, slowly building up a picture of a life.

A shadow falls on them at midday. They are walking through the Tsivon streambed, a deep, strange channel that silences them. The path meanders among large, broken rocks, and they must climb and take calculated steps. The oak trees around them are forced to grow tall, stretch higher and higher to reach the sunlight. Pale ivy and long ferns cascade down from the treetops. They walk over a bed of crumbling dry leaves among bloodless cyclamens and albino fungi.

… Suddenly, as if a hand has passed in front of their faces, they walk out of the shade and into the sunlight. Another few moments and a meadow is revealed, and a hillside, and orchards blossoming in white.

… She tells him about Ofer’s journeys of discovery through the house, his insistent examinations of every single book on the bottom shelves, the plant leaves, the pots and lids in the lower kitchen drawers. She gives him every memory chip of his babyhood that pops into her mind. When he fell off a chair and had to get seven stitches in his chin at Magen David; when a cat scratched his face at the playground — “there’s no scar,” she says reassuringly, and Avram snatches a fluttering touch of some of his own scars, on his arms, shoulder, chest and back, and a surprising ripple of joy runs through him because Ofer is whole; his body is whole.

Ora doesn’t make her life sound romantic. As young adults, the boys inevitably pull away, but there are moments of joy. She describes a family outing to a restaurant, in which the petty irritants any family faces in its day-to-day life are momentarily suspended:

So after we sit down comes the ordering, with Adam’s performances. The waitress always marks him straightaway as problematic, an obstacle in the rhythmic flow of her execution  because of his pedantic instructions — nothing with cream in it; can it be fried in butter? Do any of the dips, God forbid, contain eggplant or avocado, in any form?… And then there’s Ora’s heroic struggle with her own eye, which keeps veering to the prices.

… She is always the one who feebly suggests: “Why don’t we just order three entrées? We never finish everything anyway.” And they argue with her, always, as though her proposal contains a veiled slight of their appetites, even their masculinity.

… She knows everything will be fine soon, even good … Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection.  In just a short while she’ll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles — “for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine” — complete happiness and family.

Ora is not a character who is easy to like. She makes errors, some of them with devastating consequences but she is not an idealized creation: she is just another human being. She finally drives Adam away from her emotionally because she is unable to leave Ofer alone after he makes a mistake with serious consequences:

Ora bit her lip. Mustering up all the restraint she could find within herself, she said, “Still, Dvir, I can’t understand how a bunch of guys—”

“Mom!” Ofer yelled. A single yell that cut like a knife. They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they got to HQ, Ofer wouldn’t let her wait for him to hear the results of the preliminary inquiry, as she had intended to do. “You’re going home now,” he announced.

Ora looked at him, at her strong child with the shaved head and the pure gaze, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The question almost burst out again, and Ofer said in a terrifyingly quiet voice, “Mom, listen closely. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. Get off my case. Get off my case!”

… Ora shrank back from his power, his hardness, and above all his foreignness, and he turned his back on her and left without letting her kiss him.

It is in Ora’s deep love for her boys, the fact of her being caught up in a life only partly subject to her control, and in her guilt and worry over mistakes made that she is easiest to identify with.

At times the book seems to have too many layers and to be circuitous, like the journey is at times. The meandering walk in the middle section goes on too long. There are hints about significant aspects of the story that are only explained late in the book. But the tension of living in Israel with the constant fear of terrorism is starkly realistic. Anyone who loves another person will recognize fearing for their safety. Parents in particular will know the contrast between the young child who is totally dependent and the adult son who makes his own choices; they will understand the piercing poignancy of having to let go.

David Grossman began to write this book before his own son, Uri, was killed on the last day of the Second Lebanon War. After mourning his son, he went back and completed the novel. He continues his work as a peace activist.

The quality of the writing is uneven; some of it is simply bad, though there are patches of good writing sprinkled throughout. It’s undisciplined, shapeless and and sprawling. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the novel tries to do way too much: a love letter to Charleston that is admittedly evocative at times, the two-dimensional story of a group of high school friends and how their lives intertwine in later years — with no convincing insight into why the characters behave as they do, and a beyond-ridiculous, B-movie horror story of a killer out to terrorize and slaughter.

It’s too bad because there is great ability obviously still there in the good parts.

Leopold Bloom King (Leo) is our narrator. As a high school senior, he has already spent time in a mental hospital after the suicide of his brother and is on probation for a drug offence that he didn’t commit. His mother is a former nun and Joyce scholar and the least believable character in the book, which is saying something.

In the summer of 1969, Leo meets several high school students who have an influence on his future life.  He ends up unhappily married to one of them, although he is apparently in love with someone else. There is no text to explain why he marries as he does and none to give any clue as to who is the love of his life so the revelation, when it comes late in the book, is only words on a page — not a confirmation of previous hints or any sense of inevitability or any reader satisfaction of any sort, actually.

The climax of the book combines a character nearly dead from AIDS being confined against his will by an evil person who steals his money, a devastating hurricane, and the return of the crazed killer. No, really.

I’d never read Conroy and was only vaguely aware that he writes about the South and that he wrote The Prince of Tides. The back cover offers the adjectives “astonishing,” “stunning,” “incandescent,” “poetic,” but a second look clarifies that these words were written about an earlier work: a publishing practice both defensible and sneaky that relies on the casual bookstore browser looking for something that can be summed up in a few over-the-top words. But I imagine that reviews of South of Broad itself will yield lots of adjectives for future printings. There’s always an audience for this kind of thing.

My guess was that Conroy must be a writer past his prime, perhaps living up to  ideas of sweeping sagas, the Gothic South, and larger-than-life dramatic characters that he handled more deftly earlier in his career. Reviewers that I  trust confirmed my suspicions. In his  New York Times Book Review August 2009 piece, Roy Hoffman is gentle in his treatment: “But the mysteries of character — the revelation of how these teenagers are transformed into remarkable adults — remain just beyond Leo’s grasp. The decades his old companions are offstage, from approximately ages 18 to 38, are pivotal. Although they share their histories through pages of colorful dialogue, the “reeflike accretions that build up friendships” are often obscured. By the time the novel is transformed into a thriller — “The city of palms . . . turns into a place of galvanic nightmare” — their concerns have come to feel tangential.”

Scott Martelle in the LA Times offers a nuanced review, contrasting Conroy’s earlier work with this one: “But with “South of Broad,” Conroy’s muscle has gone lax. You don’t get caught up in his narrative so much as you commit to it. Tragic twists just appear, lacking the kind of buildup that makes them work. The net effect is the surprises, even when not telegraphed, don’t surprise. They just click over like another mile on the odometer.”

Conroy’s writing is shown to advantage in landscape description, at its best when he pulls back on the superlatives:

The smell of smoke from the chimney of our house was stronger than either the rivers or the marshes and made the airwaves above the neighborhood as dark-scented and fragrant as a night garden.

and

In the summertime, the salt water that floods the creeks and bays and coves of South Carolina is warm and sun-shot and silken to the touch … Now the tide was hurtling back, drawing the essence of its marshes, the blue crabs lying in wait for stragglers who would soon be prey. As the tide receded, the oysters would be locked tight, retaining a shot-glass-full of seawater that would hold them until the next full tide; the flounders hidden in the mudflats; the mullets flashing in quicksilver sea grass; the small sharks nosing around for carrion; the blue herons straight-legged and heraldic in their motionless hunt; the snowy egrets – the only creatures in the Low Country whose name invoked winter – staring at the shallows for a quick run of minnows.

These passages appear in the same book as:

I remove the perfect stalk of celery from Herb’s Bloody Mary and bite off the leafy top of it. With that signal, a woman dressed demurely in a black leather jacket and silk slacks removes her sunglasses. She rises from a table near the end of the bar, and unties her Armani scarf. She unzips her jacket and reveals a scant, silvery blouse, as flimsy as a sandwich bag. With a shake of her head, a cascade of golden curls falls around her shoulders. Her stride across the room, however, is purposeful, without the unstudied voluptuousness she brought to every role she played. The entire restaurant is mesmerized by this transformation of a women who has been sitting in anonymity.

Be grateful that I spare you the dialogue.

This concert attracted a younger demographic: there were teenagers in hoodies crowding into the church along with the grey-haired regulars. It was probably Tim Tsang on the synthesizer, so cool in both appearance and performance,  who drew them in, but the overall combination of the voices and the synthesizer, along with the saxophonists’ improvisations, was astonishing whether they were playing new compositions or Palestrina.

Monday: Ronnie Burkett at the Cultch (occasionally known as the Vancouver East Cultural Centre). I hadn’t seen Burkett before. Friends had raved about how he brings puppets to life, creating a miniature world so compelling that you forget he is there, holding the strings. I was looking forward to seeing his next show, but this performance was just a read-through of his next work, Penny Plain — still being workshopped and subject to lots of changes.

I say “just a read-through,” but even without the marionettes and with his frequent editorial comments,  Burkett had the audience captivated. He is one of the born showmen and he blends the tragic or outrageous smoothly into his stories: there is nothing cutesy about his puppets and no censorship of plot or language.

Thursday: Denis Villeneuve’s movie Incendies at the Tinseltown theatre: it’s about a brother and sister trying to find their father after their mother’s death, as specified in her will. It’s a powerful movie, one of last year’s film festival favourites, with large parts of the action set in some unspecified parts of the Middle East. Liam Lacey, in his Globe and Mail review,  describes the ending as flawed but having elements of Greek tragedy, which is about right. Something not mentioned in most reviews, however, is how the movie elevates the role of the notary to something close to superhero. Notaries everywhere should see this movie if they ever need reassurance that they are in a meaningful profession.

Friday: Back to the Cultch for a concert with Mark Berube and the Patriotic Few. Mark Berube is, yes, a Simon Fraser University grad who lived and played music in this part of the world for a while until he moved to Montreal a couple of years ago. The Cultch is the right size for this kind of experience: you feel close enough to touch the musicians. Berube and his crew create the atmosphere of a big party where people have picked up their instruments and started playing together (though Mark’s piano would be a bit of a stretch). As seems to happen with this generation of indie performers, they have guests who come on to join them throughout the evening: this time it was Dan Mangan (the man of the moment), CR Avery, Meredith Bates, and Brendan McLeod.

At the end of this week I got all patriotic myself, thinking about the variety of  Canadian entertainment available any night of the week. It’s at times like this I’m glad I don’t have cable TV to distract me.

However, this wasn’t a problem when listening to Hugh Dancy read By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham: the voice mainly did what it is supposed to do — be unobtrusive, even disappear, so that I am just having the words delivered directly to my mind.

By Nightfall is the story of a New York art dealer, Peter Harris, and his wife Rebecca, who weather a crisis precipitated by the visit of her younger brother, Ethan (or Mizzy). You get the story of a stage in a life (the onset of those middle-aged is-this-all-there-is? feelings), the story of a stage in a marriage (similar  thoughts about what used to be exciting and is now routine), and some light on family relationships: the tie, the love, the irritations, the obligation, the guilt. The mood is wistful and self-analysing, with some wild swings between thoughts of a new life and a careful look at what is valuable about the existing one.

This, while rather depressing at the beginning, is really well done. By the end, we know both Peter’s hubris and his awareness of his own foolishness: it’s a familiar mixture, to judge from my own self-knowledge.

The equally or more fascinating part of the book is the setting: the Manhattan art world. The attitudes of the dealers, the artists, and the buyers are perceptively drawn. Peter is motivated by not only the day-to-day need to succeed in his business and maintain a decent reputation but also a passion for art that becomes more apparent as the book progresses. It is not only the need for beauty, though beauty is part of it, but also beauty’s twin, aesthetics — the sense that something is right because of the proportions, the materials, the social commentary, and all the other choices that the artist has made.

So, yes: the meaning of life and the meaning of art. Cunningham does a fine job of addressing these two weighty items.

At the end, the snow starts falling: the last snow of April, falling all over the city, falling into the urn that Peter has just installed in Carol Potter’s garden. It brought to mind the end of The Dead, Joyce’s short story from Dubliners. In fact, someone might compare By Nightfall to The Dead: Peter and Rebecca versus Gabriel and Gretta; a young boy/man is a factor in both, and both Peter and Gabriel analyse their place in society and in their wife’s affections. If I were still in English Lit, I would be all over it.

In an article for the September 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens describes receiving a diagnosis of esophageal cancer that had metastasized to his lymph nodes and lungs. In his writing, he remains completely himself at this stage of the disease, being willing to confront the diagnosis and its likely end result with his own candid, articulate and personal touch. The article encapsulates his approach to life and now, I suppose, to death.

My generation approaches cancer and other potentially fatal diseases differently from my parents’ generation, who rarely used the word. Their discussions of terminal illnesses employed euphemism, lowered voices, and vagueness as to detail. I don’t remember hearing any of the patients themselves talking about their condition. In contrast, we learn everything we can about medical vocabulary, symptoms, and treatments.

My friend Teresa, who died in 1999, was the first of my contemporaries to openly discuss what she was experiencing. She provided summaries that I emailed to a large group of friends: a very personal gift of intimacy and knowledge that opened up the hidden world she had abruptly moved into.

Hitch describes it as another country — his experience of the emergency services taking him to hospital “as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.” His description of this country reinforces all my own fear and prejudices about hospitals:

… the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult …

I had thought of chemotherapy-related hair loss as a particularly hard thing for women to deal with, but Hitchens’ description of his own is poignant as well as sharply funny :

… I wasn’t quite prepared for the way that my razorblade would suddenly go slipping pointlessly down my face, meeting no stubble. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. (The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

Hitch wants to live to write “the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger” and I hope that his current battle (he comments on the peculiar struggle imagery used uniquely of cancer) allows him to write for a number of years yet.