For three years, I have known Graham Caveney only as the quiet, friendly man a few doors down, who reads outside his house on warm sunny days. That is, until two months ago when during a passing conversation, he invited me to the launch of his new book. Only after I’d accepted did I begin to wonder what it might be about.
In other circumstances, I might have shied away from a book subtitled ‘Memoir of a Diagnosis’. I’m not a great reader of memoir anyway, and suspicion of the ‘misery porn’ genre built around the success of novels like A Little Life would likely have scared me off.
Of course, at the centre of this book lies Caveney’s cancer diagnosis and treatment in the aftermath of a global pandemic. But misery porn it is not.
Told in short vignettes charting his life from pre-diagnosis to his present state of remission, The Body in the Library is a witty, insightful and often satirical account of how one’s relationship with the body (not to mention the self and the world) changes when confronted with illness, mortality and the unknown.
Unsurprisingly, it is stark at times – the book’s principal backdrops are a religious past that offers moral anxiety and little comfort, and a dispassionate medical environment beleaguered by the pandemic yet shot through with the relentless hollow positivity of the wellness industry.
Yet at no point does Caveney give in to the inevitable darkness of his subject matter. There is rage against the dying of the light – the fierce support of his friends and partner, the acerbic wit of the author himself, and the blunt wisdom of the many “chronically ill or illness-obsessed” writers Caveney calls to his side like a choleric chorus.
These biographers of the human condition – Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf to name a few – are as much characters in this book as the living people. Caveney weaves their thoughts and aphorisms effortlessly with his own, so that The Body in the Library feels less like a book I’ve read than an ongoing intelligent conversation from which I don’t want to withdraw.
