Pain is perhaps the greatest and most crucial challenge to empathy. We say, I feel your pain, but we can never truly. That’s especially true of pain that is maligned, hidden, enduring, often that which is suffered by women. In this meticulous novel Katherine Brabon dissects the experience of pain and illness, and the possibilities and limits of it being understood. Told from the present, an unnamed woman, 30-ish, a writer and student in inner northern Melbourne, looks back at the 12 weeks of her life when she was recovering from leg surgery for chronic pain caused by an autoimmune disease. As she rehabilitates from the surgery she meets two women, Frida and Sylvia. Both are strangely similar to herself, like a doppelgänger but more intimate. “We had known our bodies before speaking to one another,” she writes. Both are in pain, but whether they suffer precisely the same illness is never spelled out (the narrator’s illness is likewise never named, a troubling of the limits of diagnosis). To be understood so intuitively is untold relief compared to the medical flattening of her pain she experiences from doctors:
when they nod or say they have seen this, they know this, this is normal, this is common … your story loses its singularity … rather than bringing you comfort, this makes you realise you are simply the sufferer of a disease.
Otherwise the two are very different. Frida the woman meets during hydrotherapy, and theirs becomes a relationship of Melbourne’s pools and baths, from St Kilda to Carlton, as they strive for movement and recovery. She meets Sylvia sitting on a park bench, and is drawn to her stillness:
This time of stripped expectation … afforded me simply a moment to be by myself … a desire to reject something buried very deep in the structures we submit to in our lives.
The novel follows the narrator as she goes back and forth between these two body friends, as her recovery progresses, stalls, continues, halts again. But even that implies a narrative progress that the narrator would call into question. This is a novel that takes apart the stories around illness and pain, and finds them poorly equipped for the task of truly representing the experience of these diseases.
Body Friend, like Laura McPhee-Brown’s recent Little Plum, derives its action almost entirely from interior worlds. Not just thoughts, feelings and inner life, or literally the interiors of apartments and pools and change rooms where much of Body Friend is set, but the machinations of the body. In these novels I’m reminded of Olga Torcazek’s Flights, a constellation of movement and horizons both immense and intimate including deep anatomy. These books are collapsing those geographies into a kind of singularity; what more infinite source of wonder and fear could you want than your own body? In Brabon’s likening of pain to weather I’m reminded of Helen MacDonald’s comparison of migraines and climate change, the dance of complex systems and the cascading chain of events that follows disturbance:
A familiar, cloudy feeling of pain had returned. It may have been caused by the first truly cold day of the season. Or that may be too simplistic an explanation. But it is so akin to weather, the oscillation and unpredictability of a body, the inexorable quality of familiar pain.
Frida and Sylvia are portentous names for a woman dealing with illness, and indeed for much of the novel these two women shimmer in and out of metaphor, allegory, imaginary friends, real people. One extraordinary image Brabon offers is that of a woman photographed from two perspectives layered over the top of each other, so that the other is always present, and might shift into focus with the slightest movement of the eye. They represent different relationships with pain. Frida’s is moral, driven by doing things that are good for her, good for her recovery, driven by the idea of recovery itself. Sylvia is a different kind of mirror; a relationship to her body that is not built on shoulds and shouldn’ts. Convalescence, languishing are the words that the narrator often uses around Sylvia, as she reminds us of the delights of the sick day, “it is what might be asked of childhood, there was a wonderful absolution of responsibility.”
Chronic pain, the narrator writes, “steamrolls” control over a person’s life. Body Friend shows both the effort in regaining that control and the pleasures of letting it go, while delineating its limits.
Gay rating: 2/5 for peripheral queer characters.
The Library Is Open 