Book Review: The Spare Room

Mater Health Services’ Executive Director Mission Leadership, Madonna McGahan reviews The Spare Room by Helen Garner.

Helen Garner’s latest work of fiction starts with a woman named Helen preparing her spare room for her friend Nicola who is coming to stay.

Nicola has late stage cancer and has decided to stay with Helen to undergo a three week course of alternative therapies. The clinic she attends—with its questionable practises—is run by a professor we later learn is a veterinary surgeon.

The story tells of the vulnerability of people with a terminal illness, of hopes and dreams and of relationships. Ultimately it is about the importance of being there for those who are dying to enable them to live their life to the full.

There is precision in the way Garner writes—capturing complex emotions that one feels when witnessing and experiencing suffering—without dwelling on, dramatising and over-analysing those emotions.

There is brutal honesty in the way Helen allows herself to make mistakes, sometimes exploding with anger but then responding with integrity, wisdom and love to the needs of her dying friend. We are reminded of the resourcefulness of human beings in the face of adversity. In the end this powerful work stops you from arguing about what is the right thing to do. It challenges that propensity we have to judge what a person should or should not do when faced with death.

The reader experiences Helen’s response to Nicola’s denial of reality. The eventual resolution confirms why Nicola has chosen Helen to be the one to challenge the denial, take everyone to the point of harsh reality, but in the end “be there” for her friend.

There is a special undertone in The Spare Room. While it is fiction, at times it seems very close to the life of the writer, but not in a selfish way—in a way that the reader knows could be their own experience.