Though brutal and decidedly unromantic, Graham Caveney’s new ‘memoir of a diagnosis’ is told with remarkable tenderness and wit.
For three years, I have known Graham Caveney only as the quiet, friendly man a few doors down, who reads outside his house on warm sunny days. That is, until two months ago when during a passing conversation, he invited me to the launch of his new book. Only after I’d accepted did I begin to wonder what it might be about.
In other circumstances, I might have shied away from a book subtitled ‘Memoir of a Diagnosis’. I’m not a great reader of memoir anyway, and suspicion of the ‘misery porn’ genre built around the success of novels like A Little Life would likely have scared me off.
Of course, at the centre of this book lies Caveney’s cancer diagnosis and treatment in the aftermath of a global pandemic. But misery porn it is not.
Told in short vignettes charting his life from pre-diagnosis to his present state of remission, The Body in the Library is a witty, insightful and often satirical account of how one’s relationship with the body (not to mention the self and the world) changes when confronted with illness, mortality and the unknown.
Unsurprisingly, it is stark at times - the book’s principal backdrops are a religious past that offers moral anxiety and little comfort, and a dispassionate medical environment beleaguered by the pandemic yet shot through with the relentless hollow positivity of the wellness industry.
Yet at no point does Caveney give in to the inevitable darkness of his subject matter. There is rage against the dying of the light - the fierce support of his friends and partner, the acerbic wit of the author himself, and the blunt wisdom of the many “chronically ill or illness-obsessed” writers Caveney calls to his side like a choleric chorus.
These biographers of the human condition - Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf to name a few - are as much characters in this book as the living people. Caveney weaves their thoughts and aphorisms effortlessly with his own, so that The Body in the Library feels less like a book I’ve read than an ongoing intelligent conversation from which I don’t want to withdraw.
Caveney calls the blunt wisdom of the many “chronically ill or illness-obsessed” writers to his side like a choleric chorus...
Cliché though it sounds, cancer is a character here too, but not simply a faceless villain. For Caveney, sickness “rubber stamps our reality”, proves that we are alive. It is those peddling wellness and hysterical optimism who are lifeless.
What struck me the most about The Body in the Library is the way it presents readers with things we take for granted in an uncanny new light. Scenes we recognise from medical dramas, idioms of illness which to most of us are purely metaphorical, become hauntingly real - even visceral - in Caveney’s recollections.
In an act of rebellion against the numb world he finds himself in, Caveney feels deeply, observes his altered inner life so meticulously. Humour blends abruptly with the most insightful and vulnerable of reflections. Ingenious turns of phrase guide us through even the most difficult topics with the lightest touch.
The result is a story at once achingly familiar and utterly, courageously personal. A chronicle of a writer attempting to reckon with unfathomable, but one that has me chuckling to myself every couple of pages. I feel sure that I will feel the need to return to this book in future. And while it won’t claim to have all of the answers, it might just have what I need.
Reviewed by Sam Marshall. You can buy The Body in the Library, published by Peninsula Press, here.
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