`A decade ago, when I was in my early 50s, I fell ill. `Fall' is the appropriate word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love. It is even more like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles." Thus opens Tiger's Eye, the memoir of Inga Clendinnen, Australian historian and anthropologist , who became critically ill with auto-immune hepatitis in 1989.
But, reader of uplifting tracts featuring the endurance of the human spirit, beware. Clendinnen will not present you with a complacent story detailing her own bravery, the kindliness of medics, the epic of liver transplant surgery or the murmurings of loved ones at the bedside. Let's leave that to lesser writers of the feel-good persuasion. Instead, Clendinnen draws on her 30 years as an academic to subject this private experience to much the same scrutiny as she brought to her historical examination of, say, the Incas of Mexico. Having used writing all her life to communicate historical theory, Clendinnen, in hospital, used it as a means of both warding off signs of mortality like memory loss, and of recording her interior self.
"While it has been something of an impediment in life, my capacity for bafflement made me a good historian," she writes. Now, baffled to within an inch of her life, the beleaguered Clendinnen sets out to examine the nature of hospital itself, which, she declares is "subversive of all psychological, social and ideological security". But it is the death of an anonymous woman who expires alone, mid-ward, on a trolley, which makes the historian turn to fiction.
At its core, then, this unconventional memoir is an exploration of the tensions between recording and interpreting fact (the historian's metier), the unravelling of memories (the memoirist's task) and the different kind of truth which can be told only in fiction. The unconventionality is due to the book being a hybrid, composed of fragments of memoir, short fictions and accounts of hospital and illness.
Clendinnen's writing is exquisitely descriptive and immaculately, lucidly precise. It can stretch with ease from relating the hallucinations she experienced after surgery, to examining the enigmatic otherness of her mother, to the pleasures of tickling trout as a girl. Most compelling of all, though, is her examination of the nature of memory, how it embroiders and selects.
"Only fiction can redress the existential ambiguities of the real world," she asserts. As for her fictions themselves, they are almost as beguiling as the story of how their author came to make them.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic