We might spend our time alive more wisely, people say, if we kept its end more consciously in mind, but is that possible? Marion Coutts’s memoir of the two-and-a-half years that elapsed between her husband, Tom Lubbock, receiving a terminal diagnosis of brain cancer and the day the disease took him from her suggests that it’s not. The book, which won the Wellcome book prize last week, is written in a staccato present-tense prose that’s as sharp as its title, and documents her attempt to grasp what is happening and prepare for the catastrophe that’s lurking. “We are all still here,” she writes, after chemotherapy and seizures. “In the light of that fact either I do not despair or I suppress despair, I cannot tell which.”
In the past, Coutts has worked primarily as a visual artist. This is her first book and it’s impressively crystalline, full of intellectual curiosity and containing nothing approaching self-pity. Her husband was the chief art critic of the Independent, and, for him, words were everything. The tumour in his brain was located in the language centre and, as it grew, his vocabulary deteriorated; although he continued to write, with help, during his last months. His own memoir documenting his illness came out in 2012, and the disease’s progress can be seen in the shape of the sentences themselves: what starts out as complex paragraphs looks like Zen poetry by the last chapter. As he began talking in snatches of gobbledegook, as Coutts describes it, the couple’s son – 18 months old when the cancer is discovered – is undergoing the process in reverse, slowly mastering meaning.
Even with Lubbock’s death so imminent, there was little that could be done but carry on much as before. “I try to imagine futures,” Coutts says, “but can feel my imagination slipping even as I summon them.” The final impact, when it comes, is not the splintering collision she was bracing herself for, but a serene slipping away. The last days are full of unexpected wonder, joy and relief. He falls asleep at some indeterminate point and she realises that he’s already elsewhere. “I didn’t catch the moment,” she writes. “So. Just me.” Words are always insufficient in the face of tragedy, but Coutts comes as close as is possible to communicating what it’s like when our frantic, cherished, unspectacular lives run up against the unimaginable.
The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts (Atlantic Books, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
