Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry review: 'a ferocious elegance'
Sarah Perry’s account of caring for her father-in-law during his terminal illness is honest, brave, piercing and most of all true, writes Stuart Kelly
In an astonishing way it is impossible to review this book in terms of technique, style or aesthetics, and yet without the ferocious elegance of Perry’s writing the point of the book would be utterly lost. I have never read an account of illness, dying, death and grief which is quite as honest, brave, piercing and most of all true. The “ordinary man” is Perry’s father-in-law, David. The book begins with a vignette that is almost an elegy in imminence. It is not the last day but it is the last day before the inevitable: as she writes – and the beauty of this is not sugar-coated but reverence – “it didn’t occur to me to tell him he ought to stand there and look, and marvel over the effect of that declining light; that really he ought to remember it for the rest of his life, which is to say for a little less than two months”.
This is not a book about suddenness, but about edging away. David “lived for seventy-seven days, and he died for forty-eight days”. That fearful clarity is close to true wisdom, and its pared-back style reflects a greater importance. Perry’s acuity is remarkable. I suspect many people will call this book unflinching when in fact it is scrutinising. If that sounds harsh, it is no harsher than her own judgement on those days when she sat and cared for a dying man.
The descriptions of a body in terminal desuetude are done with a love that is exemplary. A once jovial fellow has “satiny pleats on his lower lip” and “dandelion clock” hair that starts to slick, the final breaths are like “magpies chattering in his throat”. Perry’s honesty means that some of the medical professionals treat them as a tick-box problem, others have a grace – there is no other word – that made me cry. One in particular, as ending looms, says simply “This is on me, and not you”, when a decision not to proceed is in the air. Giving a carer the chance to relinquish seems to me unutterably brave.
Perry’s work has dealt with questions of faith before, but here, like the Hiroshima shadow blasts, it is a dark absence that somehow lingers. Here, she returns to afterlife, belief and prayer while dealing with piss, bureaucracy and Wagon Wheels. There are parts which, as my late chum Iain Banks would say, show how reality gets away with things fiction cannot: a carer called Emmanuel, Hebrew for “God with us”? It was melancholy to see another old pal, John Burnside, quoted as another voice from behind the beyond.
There are subtle meditative moments which I could glean from every page. Perry talks about points where “I might have hoped I’d turn that night towards the sacred or the strange” (please re-read that and appreciate the keening rhythm), and insights – such as birth and death both being our only guaranteed experiences - and as she writes, “Since it is a struggle to be born, and since no life can be imagined without struggle, is it reasonable to imagine it is possible to die without a struggle, however brief?... So dying is a part of living, and like living it has its events, both difficult and marvellous. This ought not to be frightening, but comforting in its way: the craft of dying requires skills learned by living, and learning how to live may teach you how to die”.
I will speak frankly. Three times I have been at death’s door, and seen it ajar, and been hauled back. Perry’s descriptions of the sheer embarrassment of illness, I testify to be genuine, from the position of a sufferer rather than an observer. Apart from “sorry” the only thing I said, in recovery, was “interesting”. This is a necessary book, since we will all be touched by its concerns, and more than a few might learn from it. A copy, please, to every NHS trust, stat.
Perry captures precisely and achingly the sentiment the poet Robert Lowell understood - “sometimes in sickness / we are weak enough to enter heaven”.
Death of an Ordinary Man, by Sarah Perry, Jonathan Cape, £18.99
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