Tonight is a special, terrible night.
A woman sits at her father's bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters — all traumatised in their own ways, their bonds fragile — have been there for the past week, but now she is alone.
And that's always when it comes.
As the clock ticks in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her...
***
In my review of Mayhem, published this past spring, I suggested that generations hence, people will revere this as the year of Sarah Pinborough. With six of her books published in the six months since, I think my argument still stands. There was Poison, Charm and Beauty too — a trio of neat novellas riffing on familiar fairy tales with such warmth and wit that Once Upon a Time seems shallow and artless in comparison — whilst the final volume of her first trilogy, The Forgotten Gods, will be re-released in North America in early December, as the previous books in said series have been throughout 2013.
It falls to The Language of Dying to bring the year of Sarah Pinborough to a conclusion, and the postscript it presents is both bittersweet and truly beautiful. It's a life-affirming short novel about a tired old man waiting to die and the family of five that come together to bid him goodbye, and though I did not enjoy it at all, from first to last I admired The Language of Dying wholeheartedly.
It begins, as will we, with this:
It falls to The Language of Dying to bring the year of Sarah Pinborough to a conclusion, and the postscript it presents is both bittersweet and truly beautiful. It's a life-affirming short novel about a tired old man waiting to die and the family of five that come together to bid him goodbye, and though I did not enjoy it at all, from first to last I admired The Language of Dying wholeheartedly.
It begins, as will we, with this:
There is a language to dying. It creeps like a shadow alongside the passing years and the taste of it hides in the corners of our mouths. It finds us whether we are sick or healthy. It is a secret hushed thing that lives in the whisper of the nurses' skirts as they rustle up and down our stairs. They've taught me to face the language one syllable at a time, slowing creating an unwilling meaning.
Cheyne-Stoking. (p.1)In other words a common consequence of chain smoking; as is the terminal lung cancer our unnamed narrator's father has. He's been struggling for months, falling further and further from the waking world for weeks, and with only her to help; meanwhile she, as we'll see, has issues of her own — not least the fear that she simply doesn't fit. To her credit, however, she's been with him since the beginning of this... and she'll see it through to the end as well.