Ann said, however, that she felt that the book was somehow too easy to read for the subject matter. She said she had found it very easy to read, and there was agreement here too: people put in that the prose had great energy which gave it, John noted, an amazingly light touch for such dark subject matter. So, Ann said, what did she think of it? The main thing she found in this book, she said, was a huge and searing anger, and there was a general nodding of agreement. As soon as Nicola arrives it is clear that she is a dying woman, and Hel ends up caring intensively for her and having to deal psychologically with Nicola's denial of the truth and of the quackery of the clinic and with the prospect of having Nicola to stay indefinitely and possibly to die. It is related in the first-person narrative voice of a character who shares the author's name - 'Hel' - and charts the period during which she has a friend to stay, she expects for just three weeks - Nicola, who is suffering from cancer and visiting a nearby alternative cancer clinic. It is a typical Garner sentence, a writing lesson (all novels should end as completely) and a life lesson: spare, deserved, and complexly truthful, both a confession of failure and a small song of success.Ann chose this book as she had watched a TV Review Show in which it received unusually unanimous praise. 'Garner's gradual awakening to her unadmitted anger is what gives her best book, her novel The Spare Room, much of its shattering power.The novel closes: "It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over." Helen has done as much as she can do. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory-the dying friend who comes to stay-and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and funny?' Peter Carey 'A perfect novel, imbued with all Garner's usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. The two women-one sceptical, one stubbornly serene-negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's gruelling therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale. The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer.
Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. The Spare Room is an extraordinary work of fiction from one of Australia's Winner of the Victorian and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for Fiction.
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