Deborah James has been dying in public for five years. Since her diagnosis of terminal bowel cancer, she has become famous and beloved as a tireless campaigner, co-host of the award-winning podcast of You, Me and the Big C, author of a book about cancer and a humane and life-affirming contributor to the conversation around how we face death. Now she has said she is at the end of her life. She is no longer being kept alive in hospital, but has returned to her parents’ home to die with her husband, children and siblings around her.
The phrase “end of life” has become a tag in familiar phrases: end-of-life care, end-of-life pathway, end-of-life wishes. The phrase “good death” is bandied about with no context. But at least we are starting as a society to talk about death. The brilliant, intimate, funny, flaying books and articles and programmes and podcasts by people who are dying have immense value, for they allow us to think of our own endings, and how we want to die says something about how we want to live.
The first law of travelers’ tales is simply put: the worse, the better. No reader wants to hear of well-made plans or sunsets that paint the sky in glorious reds and purples. Give us a ship trapped in the ice or desperate wanderers sitting down to a meal of frozen boot. Better yet, give us two Victorian rivals in East Africa, supposed colleagues who were consumed with hate for each other, weak from fever, half-starved and half-blind but nonetheless obsessed with solving a mystery that had mocked the world for 2,000 years.
In just 200 pages, there are uncomfortable questions raised about the necessities of survival, power imbalances and the ways our fate is controlled by forces outside our control and whether we can take any of that control back.
In Portable Magic, Emma Smith wittily and ingeniously studies books as objects, possessed by readers not produced by writers. Her title, borrowed from an essay by Stephen King, emphasises the mobility of these apparently inert items and their occult powers. Like motorcars or metaphors, books transport us to destinations unknown, and that propulsion has something uncanny about it. Smith begins with sorcerers conjuring as they consult books of spells; she goes on to examine the varieties of magical reading, which range from the “spiritual transcendence” of Saint Augustine, who was converted by a random perusal of the Bible, to the “dark arts” of a “necromantic volume” such as Mein Kampf, distributed to all households during the Third Reich as a sinister talisman, the “bibliographic manifestation of Hitlerism”.
It was the thirteenth of the month –
the month concerned was April –
and I was drinking crème de menthe
and pondering on Virgil.