It’s “that most innocuous holiday”, Queen’s Birthday weekend, in New Zealand. Erin Moore, the narrator, is spending some days with her spiky Aunty Wynn and her beloved mother, Helen, on the old family farm. Helen is in the last throes of a terminal disease and has asked for assistance to end her life. The plot is driven by Aunty Wynn’s strategy for procuring the necessary lethal medicine and fulfilling her sister’s wish.
Helen, unable to speak, communicates only by short texts, and occupies that curiously central but simultaneously marginal position of anyone dying surrounded by their loved ones. Chloe Lane captures perfectly the strange transcendence of this liminal state, as normal life and time are suspended while everyone waits for the end. The nature of Helen’s illness and her condition are described movingly and she emerges as a heroic but likeable character — testament to the writer’s skill, given that Helen can barely communicate.
While the central point is the hugely important and topical issue of a patient’s right to die, rather too much ancillary material is included. We learn a great deal about Erin’s career and love life, ditto Aunty Wynn’s. One trait the women of the family share is a love of swimming; the most uplifting scene of the novel describes a family dip in the icy sea, requested by Helen on the day of her death.
The death scene is described with flashes of gallows humour, and seems convincing from a medical point of view (Nembutal is supplied by a vet — I guess the one type of medic who is well used to putting animals down). But from the social and practical side it seems a bit too easy — the legal consequences are considered by Erin, but largely evaded in the plot, possibly irrelevant to the story of filial devotion.
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Well-written in serviceable prose with occasional lyrical sparkle, the prevailing tone is gloomy. It never quite takes flight.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest books are Little Red and Other Stories (Blackstaff 2020) and Look! It’s a Woman Writer (Arlen House, 2021)
