It’s a case of tissues at the ready when reading Anna McPartlin’s latest novel. After battling cancer for four years, 40-year-old Rabbit Hayes is taken to a hospice, where she and her family gradually come to terms with her deteriorating condition. It’s a depressing premise that McPartlin has managed to expand into a rather uplifting, funny and even life-affirming read.
The book is divided into different character perspectives so we get a real sense of each family member’s agony amid their own daily grind. Her parents’ relentless battle to save Rabbit slowly begins to falter as they desperately research experimental drug trials on the internet and appeal to a faith healer — despite their daughter being a committed atheist. Her brother Davey and sister Grace ponder what will become of Rabbit’s 12-year-old daughter Juliet, who is yet to comprehend the enormity of the situation. Davey, a happy bachelor and US-based musician, is forced to assess his lifestyle and how qualified he is to take responsibility for his niece. The married elder sister mulls over practicalities and bedroom issues with three rough-and-tumble sons of her own. Meanwhile, in the hospice, when Rabbit falls asleep, she returns to her past, where we see flashbacks of her as a shy girl, and later a stubborn yet mature teenager. These flashbacks to childhood offer some much-needed light relief and give us a sense of how she developed into a strong-minded and optimistic woman.
McPartlin’s other characters are wonderfully drawn but it’s her remarkable use of dialogue and humour that gets you through what could be a too-often difficult and emotional read. One particularly poignant scene involves Rabbit asking for her family and her best friend Majorie to come together so that she can discuss her funeral. This is an affecting scene, as everyone has to confront the fact that Rabbit will soon die, yet the funny verbal sparring lightens the mood. Family dynamics drive the story— how parents prepare to lose their daughter, siblings to lose their sister and the painful separation of a mother and child — but rather than dwell on the tragedy, McPartlin highlights unconditional love, family devotion, happy memories and how people cope in the bleakest of times.
McPartlin writes with insight and patience, drawing on personal experience: her mother suffered from multiple sclerosis before being diagnosed with cancer and dying when McPartlin was a teenager. Perhaps it is because of her experience that the Wicklow author does not shy away from scenarios, subjects or characters in fiction that others might choose to avoid.
It’s a relentlessly emotionally charged read as McPartlin highlights how a woman comes to terms with her imminent passing — and indeed her past — and this intensifies towards the end but makes for a heartening, valuable work. Given that everyone will at sometime in their life lose someone they know to cancer, McPartlin’s subject matter is something a lot of readers will be able to relate to. An impressive and admirable feat.
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The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes
by Anna McPartlin
Transworld Ireland £12.99 pp362