- Bedtime Story, by Chloe Hooper. Scribner, $34.99.
Stories are how we make sense of life, from the earliest bedtime story that we are read as children, to a chronicle as adult and uncertain in its outcome as this book by Chloe Hooper.
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It was written by a writer to make sense of a real world event that threatened to turn her life upside down. Calamity strikes out of the blue, into the calm family life of two writers and their two young boys.
Chloe Hooper's partner Don (Watson) is diagnosed with leukaemia. What will this mean for him, for them? And how is she going to tell her sons, only 4 and 6 years old, about what is happening and what might happen?
As a writer, Hooper turns to the craft of story-telling in search of clues about how to talk to children about frightening things beyond their understanding. She reflects on the bedtime story, and the literature of childhood, as the family struggles through the months of testing and treatment that a life-threatening cancer demands.
The book is a memoir that moves through this threat of tragedy, between the prosaic daily tasks of keeping the family on track and the higher order reflection on the nature of narrative and grief and fear embedded in the commonplace but terrifying trial.
Hooper looks at the strategies that stories give us for making sense of challenges, fate and the shifting sands of life events. She scans the bedtime stories that her children love - The Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are - looking for clues.
Especially, she writes of stories that are well known to us, the cultural bedrock from Homer, Hans Christian Andersen, the brothers Grimm. C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, Saint-Exupery's Little Prince and other "children's classics".
She relates events in these authors' lives that seemed to trigger the need for story; for example, the death of Lewis' mother when he was aged nine. (Perhaps she could also find her model in memoirs of grief like his A Grief Observed? This is not a book for children, but a moving account of Lewis re-negotiating his faith in the face of the death of his wife.)
As the months deliver increasingly difficult circumstances, Hooper finds a way to tell the boys about their father's illness, as they witness his weakness and worsening condition through the chemotherapy he undergoes.
The family are able to make common cause with another family at the boys' school who are facing a similar trial. When the schoolfriend's father dies of his cancer, Hooper's family descend to a low point.
Breaking into free verse, and accompanied by the haunting charcoal and wash graphics of her illustrator Anna Walker, she expresses the despair of life as opposed to literature.
TEAR IT ALL UP
STORIES AREN'T HELPING
TEAR THE PAGES UP...
THEY'RE ONLY MAKING THINGS WORSE
Hooper concludes that there is no story that can make this better. Narrative doesn't cure the loss of sense that is brought on by the death of a loved one.
But against the odds, Don survives. The chemotherapy does its harrowing work and he is declared clear of the cancer.The family can now carry on, re-enter the stream of life. But is it so simple? Something about the encounter with this darkness has left its mark.
Sometimes this book is moving, and the tempo of Hooper's observations provide an engrossing reflection on the passage of experience.
At other times, it is strangely ponderous. Maybe this is a defence in this reader against the lugubrious topic, or a failing in the narrative, becalmed passages include little drama or contrast. This might also be a lesson of narrative. Unlike real life, story works by "narrative drive".
Hooper's address of the memoir to her oldest son, using the second person, also seems forced at times.
This is a device that could bring home the anguish of her situation - the purpose of writing at all - and yet it shows us another feature of narrative; that it needs to address us as readers to draw us in.
This is, all the same, a thoughtful book from an excellent writer. It is beautifully presented with illustrations that are peculiarly suited to the mood.
And it addresses a difficult topic that doesn't shirk the peculiar modern predicament of the loss of meaning in a world grown sceptical about myth.
Hooper draws out the way in which today we might turn more than ever to stories, to counter the nihilism of a medical view of life and death. It is ironic that the scientific accounts of events, produced to overcome myth, only serve to reveal how crucial it is for our acceptance of fateful outcomes to have the comfort of an explanation.
And what is an explanation, if not a story?