Lionel Shriver - So Much For That

Unlike the last book, I can't pretend that I didn't walk into this one with eyes wide open. I've read a couple of Lionel Shriver's books before (her most famous one, We Need To Talk About Kevin, was the best book I read last year) and I have huge amounts of respect for her as an author, but a certain amount of emotional resilience is required to get though her books, and I knew this one would be no exception. Especially because I knew that it is, to a large part, about the American health care & medical insurance system.

Despite watching epic amounts of Scrubs -- for educational purposes, you understand -- over the years, and also hearing about the trials and tribulations of my American friends when it comes to accessing affordable healthcare, I didn't have a lot of nitty-gritty knowledge about how health insurance in the States works. Terrifyingly jargonistic paragraphs like this one worked to shed some light, but it was the kind of light that tells you that you're not alone in the dark creaky house at night, and there's a good chance the bearer of the other light has a knife:

"See," she went on, "this World Wellness Group outfit is the health insurance company from hell. They levy co-pays on everything, including the meds, and we have to fill dozens of prescriptions every month. With their whopping deductible, you're out five grand before you're reimbursed a dime. Their idea of a 'reasonable and customary' fee is that a doctor's visit cost in 1959, and then they stick you with the shortfall. They're way too restrictive about going out of network, and Flicka requies very specialized care. Then there's co-insurance on top of the co-pays: twenty percent of the total bill, and that's in network. And here's the killer: there's no cap on out-of-pocket expenses. Add to that that their lifetime payment cap -- you know, how much they'll fork out in total, ever -- if also pretty low, only two or three million, when someone like Flicka could easily exceed numbers like that before she's twenty... Well, we had to find other coverage."

Living in a country where all hospital care is free and all GP visits and most medications are subsidised heavily by the government (although many people choose to have some form of health insurance on top of this, to get faster access to elective surgeries and more choice of treating doctors, you don't need a cent of insurance or a dollar in your wallet to get care through a public hospital), all this makes me want to claw at my face and scream.

The book centres around two married couples: there's Shep, who saves all his life for early retirement on a tropical island only to find out that his wife Glynis needs him to keep his job -- and dip into his savings -- because she contracts mesothelioma. And there are their friends Carol and Jackson, who live with the fact that their daughter Flicka has familial dysautonomia and will probably die before she gets much older; in the meantime, she's the source of the constant medical and financial strain outlined in the quote above.

I'll tell you straight off, this is not an easy book to read. At times it's excruciating. I had to take frequent breaks from it during which I read less wrenching fare. It also doesn't try to shield you even the slightest amount from the realities of illness and medicine, so if you can't cope with some really blunt descriptions of cancer symptoms and chemo and its side effects, you may not get through it.

But it's worth it not just for those of us who need an education in what a phenomenally unfair health care system looks like, but also because Lionel Shriver has a mastery of human relationships and human behaviour that is unparallelled in my experience. She writes realistic, flawed human beings; she writes them responding to good times and bad; she writes them with a depth of analysis and a keenness of perception that's astonishing; she writes likable people and unlikable ones, and she shows you how easily it is for people to swing between these categories. One of the examples that cut closest to home for me was the use of Glynis to illustrate how perfectionism is the enemy of productivity when it comes to creative pursuits.

It's a book about living within a structured, governed and taxed society, and the ways in which people play by the rules -- or don't -- and what happens when the ground falls out from under you feet and the society you've been supporting isn't there to support you in turn. It's a book about priorities. And although it doesn't say so in so many words it explains, powerfully, why the term 'temporarily able-bodied' has the same usefulness as 'cissexual': pointing out the arrogance of assuming that something is normal.

As a concept, she understood being "well" better than anyone on the planet. For After Glynis had discovered a terrible secret: There is only the body. There never was anything but the body. "Wellness" is the illusion of not having one. Wellness is escape from the body. But there is no escape. So wellness is delay. What had Before Glynis -- Well Glynis, Pre-Inexorably-Going-to-Be-Sick-Any-Minute-Now Glynis, done with her free ride, her gift of the soon-to-be-revoked illusion that she was not, after all, a body -- a body and only a body?

The book asks why we as a society have so little protocol for how to behave in the face of death, when it's the oldest and most inevitable human reality. The biggest question that it asks, though is this: how do you put a price on a human life? And how do you manage when you are forced to do exactly that? In a chillingly effective piece of structure, the start of each chapter gives you the new balance in Shep's bank account. In its way this illustration of the cost of dying, down to the last cent, is just as brutal as the descriptions of rectal bleeding and insomnia.

However, just so you know: the book doesn't leave you broken. It lifts you up. It gives you something back. After Kevin I wasn't expecting even that much from Shriver, so the ending, while it didn't pull too many punches, was certainly a balm for my horrified soul.

Margo Lanagan - Tender Morsels

I didn't know what I was getting into when I pulled this book off the library shelf. I'd heard the name of it bandied about on other blogs, and I'd heard it recommended by people whose tastes I generally trust, but my knowledge of the book itself was something like: another YA fairytale retelling? Maybe? Kind of...dark?

Hoo boy.

For one thing, I don't know how many teenagers I'd give this one to. For another, it's not trying to retell any one existing fairytale that I'm aware of, though it has elements woven through it that seem very familiar in an old, forest-dark, Brothers Grimm kind of a way. It's set in two worlds: the 'true' world, and an 'ideal' world, or personal heaven, to which a young woman called Liga escapes with her daughters. The book is about the reasons for that escape, and what happens when the barriers between the worlds start to break down. I won't say a lot more about the plot itself because I found that going into it with no expectations was actually a good way to do it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to twig to the fact that this is, starkly and insistently, a book about rape culture. It's about female sexuality. It's about the policing of female sexuality, and the ownership of it, and how difficult it is to understand your own emerging sexuality as a growing girl enmeshed in a society that keeps trying to tell you how and when and to what extent you should be exercising it. (It's also, well, about rape and sexual abuse of children, and while the scenes are never graphically described, I imagine it would be very triggering for some.)

The other main theme is related, but wider in scope. It asks the questions: to what extent can we, and to what extent should we, protect our children? Where do we draw the line between sheltering their innocence and keeping them wilfully ignorant? Given power and choice, should life be enjoyed, or should it be lived? Should it be narrow and comfortable, or painful and rich? Lanagan never flinches from portraying these questions, and the characters caught up in them, as complex and morally conflicted. She doesn't lead us easily towards the answers, and she doesn't pretend that good will always win out, even though the pursuit and possibility of justice is another theme that shines through.

There were a couple of niggling complaints that I had with the book as a whole; most significantly, I found the pacing to fall entirely flat. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through the book that I found myself wanting to keep turning the pages to find out What Would Happen Next; up until that point some things had happened, sure, but I hadn't been given any sense of overarching plot or tension. That said, I was interested enough in the characters and the subtle world-building to keep going, and everything did more or less draw together by the end.

Tender Morsels is a dark fairytale. But the creeping insidious horror of the book isn't any particular monster, or any one evil villain; it's the hovering phantom of male control over female sexuality, the phantom of rape culture. By the end of it I felt bruised and shaken and furious on behalf of the characters, and on behalf of everyone who's ever had to put up with misogynist language and entitlement and sexual harrassment and communities structured in such a way so as to endorse sexual double standards. This book will make you angry. Read it anyway. Read it because.

Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

This blog was created with the intent of writing about my experiences as a medical student/maybe a junior doctor, but I've come to the realisation that I don't really want to blog about my education and my professional life; if a blog is to have any chance at longevity, it will need to be something I can work on as an escape from the medical world. And the only other thing I do enough of, it seems, is reading books. So let's see how that works out.

The champagne bottle to be smashed against the blog's creaking hull is Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), chosen for the highly creative reason that it's the first book I've finished since deciding to give this book-blogging thing a go. (No, I tell a lie: the first book I finished was Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but me trying to review that would be laughable at best and also lend a very misleading tone to the blog as a whole. Besides, I'd been slogging away at that one for months, and anything related to Plato or Socrates or really anything pre-Renaissance is at this point a far-off and distant dream.) I picked up True History because I'm in the middle of a personal project to read every book that's ever won either the Man Booker Prize or the Man Asian Literary Prize. Honest to God, I am least one-third as pretentious as this makes me sound. I merely have a weakness for lists on which items can be crossed off, and a few of my very favourite books of all time have won the Booker, so I thought I'd expand my horizons a little. And cross some things off lists while I was at it.

Like the terrible, terrible Aussie that I am, I had been putting off reading this particular book. Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the Booker twice (the other being J.M. Coetzee), and of his other winning book Oscar and Lucinda I can remember very little beyond the fact that there was a church made of glass in it, what more could you possibly want? But I knew that True History was written using vernacular, and I wasn't sure that I would find such unconventional language easy going.

I'm pleased to tell you that I was completely wrong.

The book is a fictional memoir of one of the most recognisable figures in Australian history, the bushranger Ned Kelly. I honestly have no idea if anyone outside of Australia is like to have heard of him (there was a movie? Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger were in it?) but here down under he's certainly a Thing. One of our better-known artists, Sidney Nolan, did a series of paintings of him, like this:

The letterbox-head is an instantly recognisable motif, drawing on the fact that Kelly and his gang wore plate metal armour in that shape.

However: the book itself. Edward 'Ned' Kelly, farmer turned bushranger, eldest son of a poor Irish family, is writing out his life story for his daughter to read. It's very difficult not to feel for this sober, hard-working, furious boy, to whom family is everything and poverty is truth and justice is nowhere.

As far as the writing style is concerned, Carey's done something that I think is quite spectacular: by roughing up the syntax entirely, removing most punctuation and leaving the grammar to fend for itself, he's managed to write a highly lyrical book that nonetheless manages to convince us that it could have been written by a poorly educated man with a natural gift for metaphor.

When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships the ROLLA and the TELICHERRY and the RODNEY and the PHOEBE DUNBAR and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 3 crosses nailed one atop the other.

For all that Ned Kelly's voice sounds Irish, the book feels deeply Australian; the descriptions of the bush ring true, and there's a lot of commentary about Australia itself as a fledgling colonial place starting to find its own identity as a settlement built by, but so remote from, England.

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. In the hut at Faithfull's Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed it is the clearest sight I ever seen and soon Joe seen it too.

UNFAIRNESS. It deserves the caps. A major theme of the book is that of injustice, betrayal, how anger can be forged into action, how life takes more from -- and piles more onto the heads of -- those who can least afford it, and how theft and murder and rebellion can become the only paths that seem sensible when the world is slowly destroying you and the ones you love. It's certainly not a cheerful book, and I don't think I could even describe it as 'uplifting', but I didn't come out of it feeling like my soul was crushed beyond repair or anything like that. Mostly I wanted to roll around in the sentences some more.

True History has won prizes out the wazoo, and I think it deserves every one of them. It's beautifully and unconventionally written, the plot is never slow or boring, and it grabs your emotions firmly by the collar and drags you along with them.

Finally, I was delighted to find in the book a quote directly addressing the fact that Australia as a country has a tendency to celebrate things that maybe aren't the most deserving of celebration (eg. ANZAC Day, the great patriotic public holiday on which we celebrate a crushing defeat!). For all his criminality, Ned Kelly holds the same sort of romantic, adventurous, folk-hero appeal as Robin Hood. This novel has also brought home to me the extent to which he, as a poor Irish-Australian criminal, stood at the time for resistance against the English, who were the authorities in the colony of Victoria.

What is it about us Australians eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might we not find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

This Australian's opinion is that Peter Carey can go on making spectacles like this one for as long as he wants.