There are no atheists in foxholes, goes the saying, and indeed social scientists and evolutionary biologists have argued that the experience of war or conflict drives religious belief; in 2019, Joseph Henrich and others surveyed almost 2,000 people in three post-conflict societies – Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan – and concluded that their experience of conflict had prompted them to participate in Christian and Muslim rituals and groups. Atheism, it seems, may be as fragile as faith.
“No matter how attached you are to your own rational worldview, your rationality won’t survive long under the threat of imminent death,” writes the former Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman in her book On Another Planet They Can Save Me. Part scream, part song, it charts the gradual dissolution of her own rational assumptions, which govern everything from her views on God to extraterrestrial life. It is a brilliant, playful, layered and humane plea for openness and hope in the face of her own foxhole of intolerable suffering.
Marsman was not a soldier, but she knew a thing or two about living with constant reminders of her own mortality. In 2018, at the age of 27, the poet was diagnosed with a rare and incurable form of cartilage cancer. “There are little balls of failed cartilage in my lungs, balls that will slowly, agonisingly, take over until, at last, I suffocate,” she writes. When a doctor informs her that her illness is terminal, she lets out a scream. “[H]ow else are you supposed to behave when handed a death sentence?” she asks. Desperate to live, Marsman undergoes a barrage of treatments, including an operation to remove her arm and shoulder.
However grim her situation, there is remarkably little about her body in this book, and the trials of her cancer treatment, from surgery to immunotherapy. “After all, isn’t a disease only really interesting to the one who has it?” she wonders. “The temperature of my anus doesn’t affect the temperature of the world.” Instead, she writes about her relationship with certainty, gradually unpicking her own materialism and positivism. She opens herself to God, reads about the supernatural, and wonders whether aliens may come down and take her away. “Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, at other moments I think how crazy I was not to have allowed myself to broaden my perspective until now.”
This is well-trodden ground, but Marsman’s language is so beautiful (her translator, Sophie Collins, has done a fine job), and her textual references so original, that it feels as if we are walking on fresh turf. Her range is wild: she cites Leopardi, Pasolini, Alanis Morissette, Robert Musil, Spinoza, Euripides, Wittgenstein and William James. The most interesting sections, for me, related not to artists’ or writers’ reflections on mortality or rationalism, but those of scientists who expressed doubts about the solidity of the scientific framework that they themselves constructed. “To speak in terms of Plato’s well-known simile,” wrote cosmologist James Jeans, “we are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.”
Side by side with these reflections are Marsman’s poignant memories of the quotidian reality of a terminal cancer diagnosis, which form a strange blend of the mundane with the otherworldly. She writes that she and her girlfriend spent hundreds of euros on empanadas. “[E]ven when you’re dying, you have to eat, and those things only need a blast in the oven.” When she wakes up from an operation without her arm, she recalls that the first thing she craved was … a croissant. If the narrative vibrates with pain, there are also releases of humour; at one point she considers all the absurd things she could do to spice up her obituary, such as crashing in a paraglider or go-kart.
Any reviewer knows that the author may read what you have written; a review is intended for potential readers of a book, yes, but I also think of it as a dialogue with its author. Here there is no right of reply: Marsman died in June of this year, aged 35, and this book, more than a memoir, is a testament; to review it almost feels like a sacrilegious act, and perhaps it is best to let the author speak. “[D]ying with hope, however far-fetched and unrealistic that might be, is always better than continuing to live without it. And in those moments when everything in the here and now turns out to be utterly hopeless, I allow myself to think: on another planet they can save me.” I hope that that other planet exists, and somewhere, somehow, Marsman is still writing.
• On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman, translated by Sophie Collins, is published by Daunt (£11.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
