Story wears cancer on its sleeve
Luke Alnutt joins genre with emotional story that pulls at the heart strings
Might as well come out with it:
We Own the Sky is a cancer story that wears the cancer on its sleeve, by which I mean: the child dies.
This debut novel by Britshborn, Prague-based journalist Luke Allnutt comes with a reader’s note explaining the origins of the book: the author’s own colon cancer (the official publication date of April 3 was five years plus a day from the diagnosis).
The note is probably the most honest part of the book, which, for the next 368 pages, manipulates the heart strings and telegraphs plot points. The book’s midsection sags under the weight of the research on brain cancer and treatments and the repetitive posts on a parent-of-child-with-cancer internet forum.
There are plenty of instances in literature and film in which the reader knows something before the protagonist does, but, geez, is narrator Rob Coates thick.
We Own the Sky will probably make a great weeper of a movie. I’ll set the PVR now for when it shows up on the W network. That’s because we’ve come a long way from Jenny’s death from leukemia in Love Story.
In fact, cancer novels and cancer stories are a thing: from Elizabeth Berg’s unsentimental
Talk Before Sleep to John Green’s irreverent The Fault in Our Stars.
But it’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Lorrie Moore’s story about a child’s cancer from her collection
Birds of America, against which Allnutt must measure himself with this first-person narration of a father’s undying love for his dying son and the complete mess Rob makes of his relationship with his wife, Anna, the efficient accountant. (Why are accountants always depicted as cold and unemotional? Or, from a writer’s point of view, if you need a coldly efficient character, why does she or he have to be an accountant?)
“When all has been lost, there is always love,” reads the tag line on the cover (thus hinting at how the story line between Rob and Anna resolves itself, and also the narrator’s redemption).
Yet here’s a telling quote from Moore’s story:
“The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things.” In his reader’s note, Allnutt says he started writing the novel in his hospital bed, fearing that, with a 30-per-cent chance of dying, he had to create something that would outlast him. He transferred the pain and anxiety he was feeling and had the kid die.
My gut feeling: the more truly honest book would have been about that which a dying man fears to leave behind.