The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Hello everyone,

For this week’s blog entry, I would like to discuss one of my favourite contemporary books that I have just finished reading, contextualising it and saying something about the book’s main themes. The book is written by Helen Garner and is called The Spare Room.

In her home country of Australia, Helen Garner is known for using her life experience as the bedrock of her novels. Her first appearance on the literary scene was in 1977, with Monkey Grip, a novel about a hippie generation exploring new ways to love and live in Seventies Melbourne, which she revealed was a partial adaptation of her own personal life stories. In The Spare Room, her first novel in sixteen years, she narrates the story of two ‘old bohemians’ obliged to deal with the indignities of suffering and the shadow of death upon their friendship. Based on the darker side of her personal experience, namely nursing a terminally sick friend, Garner’s narrator Helen is named for her. But The Spare Room is not simply a fictionalised memoir. It is a story about truth, about the pressure upon those around the dying and the struggle that is coming to terms with a death sentence.

The story opens with Helen organising the spare room in her house for the arrival of her old friend Nicola. She is unaware of what lies ahead. Nicola is in the final excruciating stages of bowel cancer and has travelled to Melbourne to undertake punishing alternative treatments at the dubious Theodore Institute that she fervently wants to believe will cure her. She replaces chemotherapy with expensive intravenous Vitamin C treatments that ‘sort of scoop out the cancer cells out of your body’ but leave her shaking uncontrollably, peroxide drips and ‘ozone sauna treatments’. Helen’s life is at once turned upside down. Her family, social and professional life are all put on hold whilst she nurses her friend – ‘new life is pushed away’ as death enters her house, casting a shadow over every move the characters make. In Nicola’s three-week stay that Helen feels as keenly as a lifetime, their friendship is pushed to the limits as Helen is driven to despair.

Garner deals with dark themes but always with a characteristic levity and a mixture of mild wit and lyricism which is immensely satisfying. This frank and beautiful book is an acknowledgement of the limitations of human nature; nothing is more natural than fearing death and succumbing to emotions.

If you are looking for a book that deals with the dark sides of life but regards them with a fine sense of humour then I definitely recommend this book.