Garth Greenwell’s new novel gets as close as one can to evoking the very real indignity and physicality of being in hospital
very now and then I try to write down a description of pain, whether labour, tooth or head, and it becomes a frustrating little game in which nobody ever wins. Doctors try to quantify our pain by asking us to rate it on a scale of one to 10, or by pointing at a variety of sad faces – the McGill Pain Questionnaire consists of 78 possible words to tick, which include “tugging”, “terrifying” and “dull”, words that gamely poke around inside a feeling, but rarely fully land.
We have all or will all find ourselves here one day, in a raised bed on a humming ward, in the care of scrubbed-up strangers. I have vivid memories of a hospital room with a clock whose minute hand didn’t tick – instead, it slithered without clear rhythm between numbers, very sinister, very unsettling, especially at night when the lights stayed on and you watched it crawl forward towards dawn.
God, it’s gorgeous what Greenwell does in this book, his narrator monitoring himself being monitored, his mind and memory slipping in and out of the clean small room with its rotating cast of medical staff, slipping away to his lover, his father, his poetry, a storm. It captures the boredom, humiliation and anxiety of life in a body in a hospital with such precision and grace I dreamed myself back into those rooms most nights that I read it.
Most often, I’ve been a hospital visitor rather than a patient, and it speaks, I guess, to my luck that even in the most awful situations I’ve usually found something to enjoy in the experience. Of course, I wasn’t the one with the PICC line, I wasn’t the one masticating a dry tuna sandwich in bed, but it has felt for me like a lovely kind of opportunity, a privilege.
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