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FICTION/The Spare Room By Helen Garner Canongate, 195pp. £12.99:HELEN GARNER ONCE lighted on this sentence from Thackeray's Vanity Fair:"In a carriage sat a discontented woman in a green mantle"; she dislikes the knowingness of the omniscient narrator. So, it is not surprising The Spare Roomis written as a personal record; first-person narrated and, perhaps because she is also a journalist, her subject is current and disputatious. She is a veteran and a survivor of genre-bending commotion, and this new, compact novel after a 15-year gap shows she is still up for treading the boundaries between fiction and opinion pieces. And while her focus is always on lived experience, her prose moves easily between life-changing decisions and the daily imperative of domestic tasks.
The novel reads as a polemic against rogue treatments for terminal cancer radiated with glimpses of social comedy - as in a discussion on whether the coffee for the coffee enemas should be organic. All those years ago Wyndham Lewis called for "fanatical scrupulosity"; the kind of fidelity to life that can be reproduced in fiction and this is what we get in The Spare Room. The shape and pace of the narrative imitates the sharp time and task boundaries of the novel.
