This is an
account of Maggie O’Farrell’s 17 brushes with death, her own and those of her
children. Some of them would be seen
that way by anyone – her own serious illness as a child, her own child’s severe
anaphylactic shock – and some brought her close to death perhaps only in her
own mind – a frightening encounter with a man who might have murdered someone
else, being caught in a riptide, her mother almost, but not, slamming a car
boot on her head – but all of them caused her to meditate on the closeness of
death, mainly without fear. She suggests that once you have confronted the
immediate possibility of dying, which she did aged eight when she contracted
encephalitis, there is never again any cause to fear death. I think this is
right. I had my own encounter with the Grim Reaper much later in life, in the
form of an ectopic pregnancy when I was 38. Undiagnosed it would have killed me
within hours (thank you my GP at the time, Dr Asghar), and in the two or three
hours from first symptoms to emergency surgery I knew perfectly well what I was
facing. There was no fear, and there has been none since, including when I was
suspected of having oesophageal cancer two years ago (I haven’t).
She writes
it interestingly, setting the scene for each encounter and then veering to
another time and place in her life, and then back to the history that led to
the encounter itself. In the process she tells what seems to be the whole of
her life. I liked the way she describes the men in her life, briefly and
obliquely, but tellingly and vividly. There is a lot of love in these stories.
Maybe this
work will set a new trend, for an episodic picture of a life, on a theme,
rather than straight autobiography.
I hope so.
