Startling prospect
practitioners are better with different people.
There is a political dimension to this, as Francis recounts the cases where the cause of the illness is nothing a doctor can really treat. Poverty has no prescription, and encouraging things such as men’s sheds, yoga, tango classes, joining a choir and having a pet or a holiday or even reading is all well and good, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Politicians of late have been fulsome about how much they admire those who work in health services and notably reticent about hands in pockets to find engaged ways to stave off illness as much as recover from it. That there is still no parity between physical and mental health work is an ongoing disgrace.
There is something curious about this book in that Francis writes that “accepting that different stories are even possible, and can be rewritten, is a powerful step in the right direction”. But he admits that there is no happy ending – not ever. Even when I was most whacked out of my gourd on medication in the hospital, I was never so delusional as to believe myself immortal. In some ways, philosophy ought to be offered. Given death is non-negotiable, how do we live?
Even if you are not at present ill, it is worth reading this book because the gentle guidance it gives is actually applicable to being healthy. There are things we can do that make life, even a life without pain or fatigue or anxiety, richer.
My admiration for The Ledger is not confined to its forensic analysis of the subject, nor to the fact that many who come out of this disaster with some credit are British, but to the breadth of its context. The comparable mistakes in the Vietnam war are presented as a historical backdrop and Kilcullen and Mills often use literature, poems, novels, and references to writers to enhance their evaluation. More than a mere polemic, this is a fine book.
We’re not far into January yet so it’s difficult to tell if 2022 is going to be a momentous year or not; maybe we’ll see the back of the pandemic, maybe there will be some amazing scientific breakthrough that nobody could have foreseen. Artistically there might be an absolute blockbuster of a novel that shakes up the very idea of what a novel could be and what it might become, so that in the as-yet-unwritten history books the year 2022 will be described as a turning point.
The reason I’m thinking in these epic terms about the near future is that I’ve just been reading a very interesting and thought-provoking book by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst called The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World. It’s an examination of Charles Dickens’s amazingly busy private and public life set against the backdrop of the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal
Palace in London. The book suggests that indeed 1851 was a turning point because of the way that people began to look at themselves and the world around them, and for Dickens it was the year he began Bleak House, which can be seen to be one of his more experimental novels that in some ways predicted the modernist novels of the 20th century.
And I guess that’s one of the sticking points when trying to decide if a year is going to be a momentous one; you need to have a look at all the years around it to see if this particular year sticks up like a skyscraper and you can do that only once you can place it in context, not only with the ones that came before, which are easy to check on, but with the ones that haven’t happened yet, which is, of course, very difficult.
The fact that the Great Exhibition was happening in 1851 gave it a head start in the Momentous Year stakes; people from all over the world would be visiting London, as well as visitors on trains from across the United Kingdom, many of whom had never been out of their towns or villages before.
If this is the background, then the foreground is Dickens rushing around trying to do too many things at once and succeeding by being really well organised. I like to have lots of projects on the go at the same time and I like to walk everywhere like he did but there the similarities between me and Charles Dickens grind to a halt.
He had lots of children. He was writing plays and performing in them. He was setting up a guild for writers. He was editing a magazine called Household Words and writing for it. And then, towards the end of 1851, he began to put the words on paper that would become Bleak House.
This could be the year I start my novel, then. This could be the year I startle the Booker Prize judges.
Or it could just be the year I sit down and read all Dickens’ novels. Or some of them, anyway. Now that sounds momentous enough for me!
Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
CHATTO & WINDUS, £14.99 (EBOOK £8.99) REVIEW BY PRUDENCE WADE