I was interested in the similarities and differences between these fictionalised hospices. In addition, physical pain, as well as the morphine that might be used to alleviate it, plays havoc with one’s thought processes, creating unreliable narrators par excellence. It’s also the perfect setting for a life-review novel, the tension building as we wonder if our hero will achieve their goal before the ultimate deadline. A hospice has a unique atmosphere, part hospital, part church hall which, in the right hands, is ripe for dark humour. Thanks to Curtis Brown book group for my copy of The Love Song, published by Doubleday last year.Īs the discussion on my right to die post testifies, how we die is an interesting topic both in and out of fiction, and the working with dying people can be an emotional challenge. Although I was underwhelmed by the hospice sections, which I found neither convincing nor particularly funny, the marvellous ending cast a different slant on the journey I’d taken with Queenie, cancelling out the limitations I’d felt along the way. While I enjoyed the unfolding account of Queenie’s life, and her chaste romance with Harold (reminiscent of the popular movie, Brief Encounter, from the days of black-and-white), as well as the hints of betrayal, I was probably more excited about her subsequent years in an isolated wooden bungalow amongst the dunes on Embleton Bay, which I used to pass on one of my favourite walks when I lived up that way. Not having read that, I thought I might be disadvantaged, but the chatter of the hospice patients and staff ensured I was aware of his improbable 600 mile journey and its slow progress across the book. This is the other side of Rachel Joyce’s bestselling debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, in which an older man sets out on foot to try to reach the bedside of a former colleague and friend before she dies. Detecting some unfinished business, Sister Mary Inconnue persuades her to write more fully of the feelings she’s been hitherto unable to share, making this not just another hospice novel, but another you story. In an attempt to tidy up the strands of her life, she writes to tell an old friend she has terminal cancer. Queenie sits in the day room of another hospice, grieving for the sea garden she tended for twenty years. As Ivo’s condition worsens, and the hospice staff recommend morphine for the management of this pain, he becomes increasingly anxious about the prospect of a visit from Malachy from whom he’s become estranged. On top of this, there’s Malachy, his best friend from school and his elder sister’s partner, tempting him to sample a cornucopia of drug-fuelled highs. An insulin-dependent diabetic from his late teens, like some other young people with the condition, he doesn’t always attend sufficiently to his self-care. Ivo was born into a loving family but, after his father died when he was only six, he’s always had difficulty avoiding the influence of the wrong kind of friends. He addresses these to an initially unnamed other – using as a form of the second-person point of view I’ve discussed in a previous post – who turns out to be his girlfriend, Mia, now sorely missed. His favourite nurse, Sheila, suggests he play a game to keep his mind occupied: composing an A-Z of body parts, each linked to a tale about his life. Ivo lies in bed in a hospice, part of him, at only forty, unable to accept that he’s there.
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