Fragile line of defence
Novel describes what it means to be a health-care worker
Rest and Be Thankful Emma Glass Bloomsbury Circus
“We share this space where we are always on hold and are always on call,” says Laura, the narrator of Emma Glass's new novel, Rest and Be Thankful, describing her fellow health-care workers.
“We absorb pain, too thick with mess to notice that everything around us is drying up and growing over. We will wake up one day in a wasteland, surrounded by the crumbling bones of those who loved us and waited for us to love them back.”
A nurse in a pediatric hospital, Laura veers between the emotional highs and enervating lows of emergency medicine, subsisting on caffeine and a hardwired sense of duty. She and her colleagues avail themselves at the expense of their own well-being. “We are (cotton) sucking up the sadness of others,” Laura says, surveying another 12-hour shift of literal blood, sweat and tears. “We are saturated, we are saviours.”
So arrives the first wave of the COVID-19 novels — even if this first published in the U.K. in March, is an inadvertent one. In a brief autofictional account, Glass, herself a children's nurse in London, conveys the burdens borne by first responders and an ever-sickening populace.
Tasked with suppressing their emotions while on the clock, the nurses and doctors struggle to express them in their own homes. When a child dies, they must feign resolve before grieving in private. They are potent caregivers one minute and futile witnesses the next, scrubbing their hands until their knuckles crack and ooze.
In Laura's account, health care is intuitive and mechanical, a process of precise movements and calculations performed day after day, year after year. If the rote and rigour of the work dulls its life-and-death pressure, it contributes to a relentless, bones-deep exhaustion that seeps into the practitioners' personal lives. The physical strain of caring for sick children is so immediate that Laura and her colleagues tend to disregard the emotional wear.
Glass's rhythms are realistically inadvertent, unconcerned with objectivity — or with clarity, for that matter. Brevity ensures that the novel isn't hamstrung by a lack of character development, but for a book so rich with interiority, the exposition can feel wilfully opaque.
Laura resonates because of her anonymity: She is a representative cog in an overtaxed system. But this setup defangs Glass's more ambitious devices — hallucinatory dream sequences, shifts in perspective and chronology — which would otherwise make for captivating reveals. The book's experimental asides can feel like garnish, but they serve to widen Glass's lens and convey a fuller experience beyond the pediatric ward's walls. It functions as a powerful document, a testament to the silent class of first responders who risk their safety in exchange for scattered 7 p.m. applause during a pandemic.