Kirsty Gunn
Helen Garner, The Spare Room (Canongate, 2009), ISBN 978-1-84767-267-4, 195 pp, £7.99 (pb)
This is a merciless, brutal little book. It can be read in a single sitting easily enough yet by the time one has reached the end the feeling is that you’ve carved your own heart out and then eaten it.
There’s been little in the reviewing of The Spare Room, though, that would indicate the depths of its horror. Critics have highlighted instead the story, harrowing enough, of a terminally ill friend who comes to stay, praising its compassion, sensitivity and the gracefulness of literary style and seeming to be somewhat relieved that the book is also funny and unsentimental. Yet those qualities, of mixed and fallible human emotions rendered with wisdom and insight, are what we expect of all good writing – and Helen Garner is a very good writer indeed.
No, what makes The Spare Room rise above all the paragraphs of critical praise is something else again. It is the way the book has been so beautifully, perfectly constructed to be its own little killing machine, created line by line to undo its very narrative premise: that a friend can look after another friend, can take her into her spare room and make up a bed for her and love her and care for her as she unwillingly dies before her eyes.
For nothing about it seems murderous. The sense of material ease and Australian sun-filled rooms is cast beautifully throughout the pages, making it appear to be another of those books about women for women. Set in Melbourne, the narrator is at pains to plump up the story with all the accessories of a gentle, book-filled middle class – a house large enough to have a “spare” room furnished with kelims and fine bed-linen, a jolly, clever grand-daughter who lives next door, and lots of fine food and good wine and vodka in the cupboards . . . All details that have been noted, too, by the critics, as though the attention to domestic life and the fanatical interest in day to day care-giving describes something far more “truthful” than fiction here, that The Spare Room really is some kind of memoir, a no-holds-barred day by day account of one woman (whose name is also Helen, after all, and who is a writer) facing the terminal illness of a female friend.
The clue, though, that we are on much more sophisticated literary terrain is in the frontispiece, attributed to the novelist Elizabeth Jolley: “It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep” – which may read innocently enough at the outset, but by a few pages in is exposed as part of a more complex literary device. For the narrator doesn’t feel this kind of preparation is a privilege at all. Indeed, by page thirty nine both Helen and the scarily ill Nicola are both laughing at the same Elizabeth Jolley whose books are full of clean sheets and no sense of real life. By contrast: “That night Nicola wet the bed,” Helen writes. “I came upon her in the hall at two o’clock, backing out of the spare room with an armful of sheets. ‘I had a dream.’ she said, ‘and when I woke up in the middle of it I had piss running out of me’”. As she’s changing the bed, Helen remembers her childhood and how her mother used to do the same thing for her: “In a trance of gratitude I would watch her spread the clean sheet . . . making it nice again for the disgusting, squalid creature I had become.” It’s a swift change of mood that takes us from shock to mocking laughter to feeling and disgust . . . All in one paragraph.
There could be something particularly Australian in that savage bringing together of opposite emotions – of the good life in sunshine deeply shadowed by the savagery of a country with a harsh history of internment and racism – that sees its way into this Australian writer’s clever, knowing text. Garner’s sentences, filled with Helen laying out attractive foods on pretty dishes, also have her seeing Nicola “guzzling” juice and “yanking” on rubber gloves while considering a medical treatment that is just “benevolent bullshit”. The sheer jut and force of these kinds of words amongst all the feminine detailing of house and home have their own particularly Ocker-ish and quite intentional harshness that makes all that sun in the end only a force against which you have to squint up your eyes.
Nicola has only been with Helen for one day and yet already we barely want to see: “I was standing in a patch of sun when Nicola made her entrance . . . Her hair was damp and flat across her skull. Her nightdress, dark with moisture, clung to her body . . . But . . . she was smiling, smiling, smiling.” That rictus of a grin stays on Nicola’s face throughout, becoming more and more monstrous, yet here she is still pages away from playing out the full gaping neediness of one who is in denial about her illness and physical state. Seeing an old banana “abandoned in its loose, spotty skin” she falls upon it, crowing, “Ooooh . . . I’ll have it for breakfast.”
What comes to be the story then is not, as the plot describes it, a journey towards a sort of truth telling (Helen finally confronting Nicola with the idea that her alternative treatments aren’t working) but rather an exposé of the huge distance and moral hypocrisy that exists (particularly, I think this book is saying) in female friendship. Suddenly The Spare Room makes this woman reviewer see the value in the way men, by contrast, play out their undemanding roles for each other, where a few words spoken over a drink constitute all that’s needed in the way of concern and love.
But it’s only at the end of this book when we see that and realise the awful thing we have done to ourselves by reading it. For we have let ourselves believe that what we are reading is an unfolding of Helen’s understanding, accompanying her on a kind of journey, that is not – thank god – our own. Yet all the time we have been accomplices in a literary trick: for the Helen who writes The Spare Room is the Helen of the end of the book, not the Helen we have been reading. And she, like the reader by now, is a terrible, knowing, emptied out creature who is only too aware that the very premise of her story set upon the possibility of female friendship surviving the horrors of illness and the stinking, decaying body, has become impossible to see out. The book’s lie is its truth – and everything about it, from its daintily coloured cover featuring a slim woman in a skinny cardigan and coral coloured skirt exposes us to that fact like no other reading experience I can think of. Women beware. The last lines of The Spare Room say it all. About her dear friend Nicola, Helen finally writes: “It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over.” After that – no more cups of herbal tea or womanly chat. There is only silence.
