It’s hard to do right by the dying. We want to send them out with dignity but also remember them at their best. We have to wait upon and look after them, even as their body weakens, their mind goes, their mood swings, their memory fades….
Helen Garner’s The Spare Room is a hard look at these trials.
Helen and Nicola are both new-age, hippie types, now in their 60s. Helen is the grumpy, sensible one. Nicola is the bubbly socialite, the sort that knows everyone and always has things to do. She’s got a knack for reading people, but is a bit naïve.
Nicola has invited herself to Helen’s house for a few weeks. She’s popping down to begin cancer treatment at an alternative health clinic. It’s gonna be great hanging out with Helen - just like the old times!
The book opens with an omen. As Helen does up the spare room, she leans a mirror against the wall, but it falls over and shatters:
… the Iranian rug was thick with the glitter of broken glass. I swept with the dustpan and brush, I beat with the millet broom, I hoovered in cunning angled strokes. The fragments of mirror were mean-shaped and stubborn, some so miniscule that they were only chips of light. They hid against the rug’s scalp, in the roots of its fur. I got down on my knees and picked them out with my fingernails. (4-5)
It’s almost like she’s grooming an animal here, searching through its “scalp” and the “roots of its fur”. The description of the rug is grotesque, but her cleaning is lovingly methodical.
Garner is a really good writer. She conveys anxiety without ever telling us outright how Helen feels. She shows just enough of a character before sending them off screen and lets a scene run for just the right amount of time before cutting away, leaving the rest to our imagination. Everything is balanced.
This gives her characters the sense of having lives that continue off the page, while we’re not looking. And it reminds us that other people are ultimately unknowable; we can only guess their true thoughts from the little pieces we’re lucky to glimpse.
And what they show to us may be a very careful presentation. Though Nicola puts on a cheery face and tries to be the girl everyone adores, Helen knows she is suffering. It’s impossible to hide. Nicola can’t even eat a banana and wakes up every morning in agonising pain, her bedsheets soaked with sweat.
Nicola is dying, but she’s in denial. And Helen has to be her caretaker. She changes the bedsheets and tucks Nicola into bed every night with two water bottles and a big doona (duvet). She brings her food. She drives her into town for her “treatments”, which consist of massive vitamin C injections that leave her barely able to stand. The clinicians seem hardly fazed.
Helen wants to be open-minded about the alternative health clinic. She knows it’s bullshit though, and while she loves Nicola, she resents having had the role of caretaker thrust upon her. Yet it’s her duty to help her friend accept death and go well.
Helen tries to draw strength from her faith. Her relationship with God is slightly shaky, shown in clever ways such as how she awkwardly asks her sister to say a blessing after a lunch-date, and then thanks her before she has even finished:
I stood in front of her, listening and nodding. She put her palm against my forehead. Have mercy on us. Then she made a little twirl with her thumb, maybe the sign of the cross, I couldn’t see.
“May the lord bless you and keep you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“And make His face to shine upon you.” (100)
Helen also draws strength from the women around her, especially Nicola’s niece Iris, who has already had to put up with dying Nicola inviting herself into her life. The two convince Nicola to go on painkillers and they get her to accept the truth. It's the end.
Nicola breaks down and admits her bluff. “No one wants to know about it, if I’m sad or frightened… I’ve learnt to shut up and present an optimistic face.” (142). She thinks her itinerant life was a waste, but it wasn’t. She has friends who love her, and they give the gentle assurance that they’re in it till the end.
“I wish I still smoked,” says Nicola begrudgingly. The women instead go out to drink their tea on the step, in the last of the evening sun. “We looked each other in the eyes and away again, open and free. It was like being submerged to our chins in calm water. Our limbs were weightless, and so were our hearts.” (145).
Nicola completes her treatment and moves on. She hops between different sets of friends until her condition worsens and she has to go into a hospice.
The final chapter is Helen reminiscing about the last weeks of Nicola's life. She regularly flew up to look after her, and recalls sitting in a room where there always seemed to be people coming and going:
I did not foresee that two Buddhists would chant her out of there: that with Clare and Iris I would crouch shuddering in a corner of the dim hospice room, and listen to the thrilling alto drone of the women’s voices, calling on all compassionate being to come to that place, to come to Nicola, who like each of us in this life had been sunk deep in the mud of unbearable suffering; for whom the light of this life had set, who was entering a place of darkness, a trackless forest; who had no friends, who had no refuge, who was poised on the lip of a precipice, a frightful chasm into whose echoing spaces she would plunge and be swept away by the mighty wind of karma, the hurricane of karma. I glanced up from this scalding vigil and saw her sister’s face in profile against a black curtain, patient and stark, as grand in the remnants of its beauty as was the face that lay gasping on the pillow. (192).
In a strange way, I’ve always liked funerals. They always bring people together, and all these strangers come with stories you’ve never heard of the person you always thought you knew so well. Because of your connection to the dead, you realise the significance of every word you’re told, and leave feeling like you know them even better than when they were alive.
The Spare Room’s ending is like a funeral. It releases all these emotions in a graceful whirlwind, in Helen’s final goodbye to Nicola.
Garner’s writing prefers to gesture at things, rather than say them outright. It has a very Australian (and Kiwi!) feel to it: though we’re outwardly friendly, we tend not to like saying how we really feel, and are slow to reveal our true emotions.
Big portions of The Spare Room are just a bit too subtle, with not enough happening. Yeah, there are some dickhead clinicians floating around. Helen yells at them and reports them for medical malpractice, but you’re left hanging around waiting for the ending you know is coming from the first pages.
I just wish she let her hands go more often, as they say in boxing. She writes like she’s afraid of sounding sentimental. Beautiful moments are broken up with the self-conscious remarks of characters that almost sound like Garner reassuring us that she’s not gonna get too sappy.
I had the same experience reading Garner’s short stories. They were well-crafted, but wash over you too easily and never really stick in your gut. They’re like ambient music: you put it on and it sounds nice, and whenever you stop to pay attention you like what you hear, but most of it softly plays out in the background without you even noticing.
Antipodean literature tends to fly under the radar for whatever reason, maybe because insecure settler colonies loving cringing about themselves. They say things like “we have a boring history!” and “we don’t have a culture.” There’s always this sense that we’ll never produce anything “cultural” that can rival the rest of the world.
Well that’s just not true. I think if Helen Garner had the right story, something which let her build up and release the tension several times through the book, she could easily write a masterpiece of English literature. Maybe she’s already written one.