Aids has been the cause of death for millions of people since the condition was first identified at the end of the 1970s. Over 90 per cent of those deaths occur in developing countries: but the picture we in the west are more familiar with is of somebody like Freddy Mercury or Kenny Everett, glamorous, sophisticated - and doomed.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is a slow and painful way to die, causing great physical and mental suffering for the victim, and extreme psychological distress to those who love him or her. But sometimes the most gruelling stories are best told simply. London journalist Emma Dally takes this route in her account of the last months in the life of her younger brother, John.
It could have been subtitled "A Plain Tale of the Late 20th Century". The outline facts are familiar enough now, and the physical deterioration of AIDS has been documented in both biography and fiction, most recently and effectively in Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship. The fascination in Dally's book lies in her depiction of herself, her whole family, and these stories as the backdrop to John's.
Early in the book Dally describes her relationship with a colleague with whom she used to travel home from work. "We both know," she writes, "that when people talk about their families, you only have to probe a little to find them riveting. Then you become involved and want to know how they are all getting on, so you need to catch up on these real-life soap operas every now and again to discover what is happening to the plot." I don't know how artless the comment is, for this is the key to her own book, and what makes it such a page-turner.
Dally tells the story in an almost crisp, no-nonsense fashion. At times she allows herself the indulgence of reflecting that John, at 35, will not see another birthday, or dwelling on memories of the blond baby whom she, five years older, cosseted and mothered after he came into the world, the fifth of six children born to two psychiatrists, in 1961. But that is the exception. Mostly she is the reserved and practical Oxford graduate, secure in the upper-middle class world of literary and journalistic types, with an almost cold-blooded attitude that she might have inherited from her doctor father, who, she tells us "lived his life outside his family, almost as an observer".
Her own detachment at times is either curious or admirable, depending on your point of view. When John dies, naked under his bed-sheet, and one of his friends asks her if they should dress him before the undertaker arrives she is unperturbed. "Oh, I don't think so," she says. "He's dead, so what's the point in dressing him up now?" Then (of course) there is an embarrassing scene when the funeral home staff arrive and John's former partner has to rush around ironing a good shirt and finding a suit that will fit the dead man.
By this stage of the book the tragic twist in the tale has been revealed, part of the explanation for the ambiguous subtitle. Dally had already lost another sibling, her older brother, Simon, who had an unnatural and untimely end, when he shot himself on Easter Sunday five years earlier. Her family, six children, divorced parents and their new partners, grandchildren and aunts and uncles, had gathered at the country house for a big meal. Some of them had been out for a walk when they returned to find him dead on the lawn.
Dally writes movingly of looking at a photograph that had been taken minutes earlier. "That image marks the end of my old world . . . Over the months, some of us slowly came back together but the family was changed forever."
Simon had suffered from manic depression, and had alienated himself from many of his friends and family by his puzzling behaviour. He was an accomplished man who had not attained much material success. Dally relates the irony, as it turned out, of his resentment at the wealth amassed by John and Adam, the youngest in the family, who had started a courier business in London and then repeated the achievement in New York.
Dally is also frank about her own inner struggles during the eight months of John's last illness. Married, with three little girls, she is (at the time of writing the book) deputy editor of She magazine. It is experiencing circulation losses, and Dally is under pressure to come up with new ideas and take part in focus group sessions, which she (correctly in my view) finds a waste of time. "My brother is dying and I am spending my evenings like this?". Such are the demands of modern life, especially in Dally's society, where self-control must always take precedence over emotion. "I have to keep going . . . I must appear in control, mature and professional . . ." Eventually she has to take a week off and consult a psychotherapist, and she manages to pull herself together.
Although this is ostensibly the story of John Dally's slow death, he is not really centre-stage. Dally tells us he is big and handsome - "a young James Hunt" - when in his health, generous and warm hearted but always anxious about others' acceptance of him - something she links to the dyslexia which made him an academic non-performer in a family of high achievers.
But he is almost a marginal character - the catalyst but not the focus - and it is Dally herself who is the main interest, coping with all the mundane but nonetheless compelling details of modern urban life.
It is Dally's endearing honesty about her thoughts and feelings that lift the story above cliche or melodrama. It is a tribute to loving sisterhood as much as to a young man struck down in his prime.
Angela Long is an Irish Times staff journalist