And Finally: Matters Of Life And Death
Henry Marsh Cape €17.50 ★★★★★
Ithink we can call off the search for the World’s Most Calmly Imperturbable Man. The winner is the patient on whom Henry Marsh once performed a bungled operation to release a trapped nerve. The next day, Marsh approached the bed and told the man, ‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news – I’ve operated on the wrong side of your neck.’ After a thoughtful silence, the patient replied, ‘Mr Marsh, I put in fitted kitchens for a living. I once put one in back to front. It’s easily done. Just promise me you’ll do the right side as soon as possible…’ Marsh, right, is the English neurosurgeon whose bestselling 2014 memoir Do No Harm: Stories Of Life, Death And Brain Surgery described, bluntly and breezily, how it feels to drill or saw into a human skull and forage in the spongy brain for some microscopic intruder that threatens a patient’s life. He also told shocking tales of NHS mismanagement – and of his own ineptitude that sometimes left his patients at least half-dead.
And Finally is a sequel of sorts – about what happens when a doctor, 40 years into his career, becomes a patient. It starts with a horrible shock, when Marsh volunteered to take part in a study of brain scans. Expecting to see an organ of ageless perfection on the screen, he gazes instead at ‘ageing in action, in black and white pixels, death and dissolution foretold… my 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered… I am starting to rot’.
From this ghastly revelation, Marsh embarks on a journey towards surgery and recovery – but not on his brain. In Chapter 4, he reveals that he’s been diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer (he likes to volunteer such information casually) and the book follows his preparation for the ordeal. His intention, though, is not to horrify the reader with pages of pain and mortality. He spends most of his time discussing everything else on his mind: from making furniture to hanging out with his granddaughters.
A tumbling, poignant, funny and slightly bonkers memoir that leaves you as puzzled as ever by the complexity of the brain but entranced by the author ’s pure enjoyment of what Philip Larkin called ‘the million-petalled flower of being here’.