I\u2019ve just read two novels, both about the death of someone the protagonist loves, both about grief and guilt.<\/p>\n
I started reading the first, \u201cA monster calls\u201d, by Patrick Ness, with Raffie (aged 9). The protagonist, Conor, is 13. It is Conor\u2019s mother who is dying. He is having a terrible, terrible time. He is consumed with worry about his mother, who is in the later stages of cancer and is, early in the book, taken into hospital. She is a single mother. The father lives with a new family in the USA and only visits briefly and is rather useless.\u00a0\u00a0 Conor\u2019s mother\u2019s mother expects to take over as carer for Conor but she is a busy working woman who is also consumed with worry about her daughter, so has little time for Conor. Conor has fallen out with his best friend after she let the word out at school that his mother has cancer.\u00a0\u00a0 He is also the victim of a particularly cruel bully. He has nightmares. And then the monster \u2013 a fantastic literary creation, an embodiment of the life force moulded from the yew tree at the back of Conor\u2019s house \u2013 arrives.<\/p>\n
Yesterday my palliative-care nurse, whose remit includes everything from the pills I take to preparing my family for my death, gave me a very clear \u201cbeware\u201d look when I said I was reading it with Raffie. Raffie and I had still not finished it, so this morning I read the remaining few pages by myself \u2013 and decided I would not share them with him. They are too tough. They made me cry. There is a big difference between a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old, and, unless Raffie asks (I doubt he will), I\u2019ll quietly put the book away. I don\u2019t think he is having nightmares as cruel or as Conor\u2019s, and we\u2019re arranging for one of the palliative-care nurses who specialises in what a death in the family means for the child, to talk to him.<\/p>\n
The second book is \u2018The Shock of the Fall\u2019, by Nathan Filer. Mick, from the Book Group, chose it as the next book for our group to read, so we\u2019ll be talking about it there next week. The protagonist, Matt, is between 6 and 19 over the course of the story. When he was 9, his brother, Simon, two years older, died in an accident which, Matt feels, was his (Matt\u2019s) fault. In a jumbled-up sequence of episodes sometimes as confusing as the state of Matt\u2019s head, we follow Matt\u2019s course from a \u2018normal\u2019 schoolboy, bright and popular, in a usual kind of happy-ish family, through a period where his mother went mad and kept him almost imprisoned at home, to drink and drugs, moving out of home, hearing his brother\u2019s voice in all sorts of places, breakdown, getting sectioned, schizophrenia diagnosis, life in the psychiatric ward, being let out, social workers and the Day Centre, and writing his own story. The book is written with first-person intensity (complete with fractured narrative), and left me experiencing Matt\u2019s paranoia and guilt myself after a session of reading. Matt makes a nice metaphor of \u2018the small print\u2019, not only of advertisements and agreements but also of social situations: all those understood points of how you are expected to respond and behave, where you might get punished if you do not read them carefully and interpret them correctly. He explores his family tree to see where the snake \u2013 mental illness – had reared its head in his family before.<\/p>\n
STORY SPOILER WARNING<\/strong><\/p>\n Here is where I warn you, the reader: I\u2019m about to tell you enough of the endings to spoil the stories. We had Major Sanctions on Harry Potter Story Spoilers (HPSS\u2019s) when Boris and Maddie (the two older children, now 22 and 18) were of Harry Potter ages. If you are sufficiently intrigued to plan to read either book, stop reading here! (This is like the bit in The BBC News on a Saturday evening, in England in the 1970s and sometimes even now, where the newsreader says \u201cthe football results are coming up on the screen; look away now if you intend to watch Match of the Day later\u201d.)<\/p>\n In \u2018A Monster Calls\u2019, the monster says to Conor \u201cYou must tell the truth or you will never leave this nightmare\u201d, \u201cYou will be trapped here alone for the rest of your life\u201d. In \u2018The Shock of the Fall\u2019, towards the end we have \u201cI\u2019ve told you about my first stretch in mental hospital, but I\u2019ve been back in since. And I know I will again. We move in circles, this illness and me.\u201d<\/p>\n In the first book, Conor does tell the truth and the ending is full of hope. In the second, we still have some glimmer of hope \u2013 Matt has after all been able to write the story, and also arranges a memorial for Simon \u2013 but this is ten years later. My reading of the second book, primed by both the first book and my situation, is that it is an exploration of what it is like when the protagonist (and his family) does not tell the truth, with the schizophrenia coming out of the bottled-up grief and guilt. Both books address the same moment.<\/p>\n Both are committed to the benefits of talking about it.<\/em><\/p>\n I do my best to call a spade a spade: to say \u201cdie\u201d rather than \u201cpass away\u201d, \u201cafter I die\u201d rather than \u201cwhen I\u2019m no longer here\u201d. (Neither Conor, nor his mother, father or grandma, can bring themselves to use the word \u2018die\u2019 throughout the first book.)<\/p>\n I don\u2019t always manage. Specially when Raffie is present: sometimes it feels gratuitously harsh.<\/p>\n And, more important, I\u2019ve told Raffie (and of course Boris and Maddie). I\u2019ve told them \u201cI am going to die\u201d. And sooner rather than later, most likely within five years. It\u2019s a heavy topic and I don\u2019t go out of my way to bring it up again, but I\u2019ve told them, and they won\u2019t forget. Both books give me a pat on the back for that.<\/p>\n Afterword<\/strong><\/p>\n We should always be aware of vested interests. Both authors \u2013 Patrick Ness and Nathan Filer \u2013 make their livings with words. They are good with words. They probably like<\/em> words. Given a problem, they are probably more likely than other members of society to come up with a verbal rather than a non-verbal solution. \u00a0They would be likely to favour a talking or writing cure to a problem like grief over a pharmaceutical one, or a physical one such as yoga. \u00a0Books tend to be biased to verbal solutions, just like capitalists tend to be biased towards capitalist solutions. It doesn\u2019t mean they are wrong, just biased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve just read two novels, both about the death of someone the protagonist loves, both about grief and guilt. I started reading the first, \u201cA monster calls\u201d, by Patrick Ness, with Raffie (aged 9). The protagonist, Conor, is 13. It is Conor\u2019s mother who is dying. He is having a terrible, terrible time. He is … Continue reading Two Books About Grief<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":379,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}