M.J. Hyland on Helen Garner's The Spare RoomI started reading
The Spare Room in bed, late at night, and I didn't stop reading until 3 a.m. When I got to the end, I wanted to start over. The Spare Room is a masterpiece. Peter Carey says it's perfect. I agree. Garner's prose is a sublime example of the 'clear pane of glass' George Orwell talked about.
The claustrophobic drama is made so alive and vivid that what unfolds is felt as though it were experience itself. Garner writes like John McGahern at his very best: beautifully, smart, and with perfect pitch. The only book that comes close to being as brilliant on the subject of death and dying is A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.
Garner must take it all. She made me cry. She made me feel. She made me think. Every prize in 2008 should be hers. If we happened to be competing for the same prize, I'd withdraw. She'd win anyway, so what am I talking about? This is one of the greatest books I've ever read.
M. J. Hyland is the author of How the Light Gets In (2003), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Carry Me Down (2006), winner of the Encore Prize and the Hawthornden Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Hyland lives in Manchester, England, where she teaches at the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University.
