Tiger's Eye
Inga Clendinnen
Cape, £12.99, 304pp
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Time was, if you dared to write honestly about sex, you were cool, you sold books. Not any more. This is the age of serious, preferably terminal, illness; wards, drips, tumours and biopsies are the happening literary phenomena. But why? Does staring death in the face lend a writer any special literary merit? All it really generates, surely, is unrelenting drama, upfront pathos, that constantly queasy equation.
Australian Inga Clendinnen is an internationally acclaimed historian and writer. Ten years ago she became suddenly, acutely ill with liver failure. After a frightening descent - unexplained bleeding, ceaseless pain and mental deterioration - she was finally offered a liver transplant, following which she hallucinated wildly for many days. Though the chances of the new liver "taking" were never great, today she is healthy enough and, judging by her recent output ( Reading the Holocaust won a clutch of 1999 prizes), as prolific and acute as ever.
If only such an ordeal and brave recovery justified this disjointed and unengaging volume. Though it has its moments - the passages in the hospital are mischievously well-observed - this ragbag of incidents and observations never amounts to a well-crafted whole. Not sufficiently coherent to qualify as satisfying memoir, neither is it experimental enough to be the emotional scrapbook that I suspect Clendinnen intends.
Because I bet I'm in the minority (the book spent weeks on the Australian bestseller list), let me try to explain why, sympathy apart, I just don't believe this particular empress is wearing a stitch. The book hopscotches from illness memoir to childhood reminiscence to short fiction and research notes. Then there are the pages of Clendinnen's post-operative hallucinations; dreams are dull to all but the dreamer. The short stories - illness catapulted Clendinnen's first foray into fiction - are decent enough, but for me they only delayed the far more exotic hospital action. The same goes for the supremely turgid account of one Mr Robinson, a 19th-century protector of Tasmanian aborigines, in Clendinnen's first piece of historical prose after the operation.
The fragments of Clendinnen's 1940s Melbourne childhood are tender, insightful and moving, but get us nowhere - which brings me to the last problem. For all the author's undeniable writerly dexterity and her determination to grow something worthwhile from personal pain, she remains a frustrating mystery. I acquired no sense of her daily life; the members of her family are barely mentioned. These near-death memoirs feed hungrily off what is at stake, yet this solipsistic account rarely allows these significant others even a walk-on.
Maybe that's her business, but here it disconcerts. What kept her going as she battled the grim reaper? Surely it was more than an obscure missionary and a sudden taste for short fiction?
