Book review: Turning hell into heaven

A JOURNALIST recently commented that, since science has left us so few mysteries, death has become the final frontier. Perhaps this explains the growth of a new genre: books by those who have survived a serious illness, which read like missives from some impossibly remote country. But, as with travel, facing death is no guarantee of broadening the mind.

The most recent addition to the genre is A Season in Hell, Marilyn French's memoir of the four years she spent recovering from cancer. The American writer, best known for her feminist novel The Women's Room, was forced to retreat from her highly public life after she was diagnosed with a metastasised oesophageal cancer in 1992. She was not expected to survive it, but confounded her doctors when the tumour disappeared after her first course of chemotherapy.

This was only the beginning of a long journey towards something resembling a normal life. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy continued, with their own horrific consequences of kidney failure, a heart attack, osteoporosis and neuropathy (the loss of nerve sensation). In 1993, French fell into a coma for two weeks. It was another two years before she could begin to live independently.

During this, her bleakest period, she contemplated suicide: "I had to make a choice literally daily about whether I wanted to continue living a life that was essentially unbearable. When life is unbearable, one needs to own the alternative of not living."

This struggle to assert control over chaos, and the painful realisation that your former life can never be resumed, is a powerful theme of the book. What also comes into sharp relief is the support French received from her children and friends, who "renewed my life by transforming hell into a kind of heaven". In her most vulnerable state, she felt truly loved for the first time in her life, and has ever since savoured the sensation.

Amid the clarity of French's self-understanding, however, there are great doses of irritation, when she meanders away from the bigger picture. In hospital, she rails against uncomfortable showers, "ugly" waiting rooms, non-stop television and bad food. She is critical of her doctor's bedside manner, but not of the system of private health care that must inevitably bankrupt many cancer patients or bar them from the most effective treatments. She herself was left with massive debts.

More perceptive is the author Robert McCrum, who writes about his experience of recovering from a stroke in order to help the more than 150,000 people a year in the UK who "have suffered as I did". McCrum, literary editor of The Observer and former editor- in-chief at Faber, was 42 when he suffered a massive stroke that "poleaxed" him. Like French, he spent months going through the process of recovering a bit of himself each day.

McCrum also had a supportive family, and acknowledges how instrumental his wife - the journalist Sarah Lyall - was in helping him to recover. But here the authors part company. McCrum writes with a clarity that French often lacks. He allows his readers to see the depths of his emotional and physical vulnerability, which makes him a far more likeable and convincing narrator.

While lying in hospital, he thinks back over a trip to East Timor just before his stroke, and dwells on the irony of searching for his own private battlefield. "I also realised that I had been given a story that made most of what I'd written previously pale and uninteresting by comparison." The stroke became an event that not only changed his writing life, but became absorbed into the very core of his personality.

McCrum is humbled by the "insult" that his brain suffered, and goes through discrete stages to rebuild himself. But he does not shrink from admitting his fears, and the limits of his former personality that he must exceed. He writes about his wish to re-enter his professional life, while wanting a special status: "When I was no longer a dramatically ill person and had become just a 44-year-old, nearly-middle-aged man with a limp and a mild speech impediment, I somehow wanted more. I wanted to retain my singularity."

Towards the end of his "year off" he is saved by his wife Sarah falling pregnant. The pendulum swings back. Death, to McCrum and French, appears to have lost its mystery. The conundrum is learning to live - and to savour in a new way what life you have left.

Julie Wheelwright