was founded as a private nursing home, not
for the likes of Lenny and Miriam, but then
requisitioned by the NHS, although with
the same doctor in charge. Dr Limb has his
own secrets, and his own reasons for failing
to obtain Streptomycin for all his patients.
Something has to be done, and is done, and
at this point, plot takes over — a slightly
unconvincing plot. There has been so much
depth and richness, so much human sub-
tlety, that what happens next is of far less
moment.
The novel is divided into three parts.
The first two are very good indeed, unusual,
original, often very funny, moving and even
informative — and there is nothing wrong
with fiction that teaches. It is the third part
with which I have a quarrel, in that it is
redundant. It is as well written as the rest
but we do not need to catch up with the
characters as they have aged and moved
on, married, lived or died. The power of the
scenes set in London, and then in the sana-torium, are diluted as they recede in time.
But I still doubt if we will read a more
distinctive work of fiction for many months,
or a writer whose language crackles with
vitality and whose descriptive powers are
working at such a high level:
The undertaker had taken their father away
to prepare him to be buried in the ground
like a gnawed bone. Their mother’s face lost
all form. Her features slid around on it.There are laughs too, and those are even
harder to extract from a reader.
‘What did you think, Valerie ?’ said Lenny.
‘It’s not really to my taste, but I can see the
essential appeal of it, in a raw kind of way. It’s
quite interesting.’
‘She talks like that sometimes,’ said Miriam.
‘Pay no attention.’
Makes your ears twitch.TB or not to be
Susan Hill
The Dark Circle
by Linda Grant
Virago, £16.99, pp. 310
If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will
have hung over your childhood and youth,
as it did mine, and Linda Grant’s new novel
strikes many a chord. My maternal aunt had
the disease, and spent months in a sanato-
rium like the one described in The Dark
Circle, but finally had a thoracotomy
(removal of a lung and seven ribs). She
was also given the ‘new’ wonder drug
Streptomycin and together with the oper-
ation, it cured her to live until she was 86.
From the sanatorium, she sent me drawings
of herself lying under a blanket on the freez-
ing terrace halfway up a mountain.
I only include these personal notes
because I remember the whole drama viv-
idly, even though I was only six or seven,
and Grant’s novel, set in 1949, rings as true
as if she herself had experienced life in the
Gwendolyn Downie Memorial Hospital for
TB patients. The descriptions of the atmos-
phere, the sense of sickness and timeless-
ness and despair, the half-hearted attempts
at camaraderie, the horrible medical proce-
dures, the way everyone coughed and spat
into handkerchiefs and had to take their
own temperatures are exactly right — as
my aunt’s letters (sparing a child nothing)
attested.
London Jewish twins Lenny and Mir-
iam are in their early twenties and appar-
ently full of life when they both contract
TB and are sent to the ‘Gwen’. They have
been as close as two peas in a pod, sharing
everything, including a room, from birth,
until they enter the sanatorium in Kent
and are separated. Their relationship, espe-
cially Lenny’s fierce, protective devotion to
his sister, is unusual and moving. They are
adults, they have experienced adult life in
the city — and yet in some essential way
they are still children.
Life in the hospital separates them
and also forces them into the company of
others, either those not on full bed rest and
able to eat in the canteen, or some, like
Valerie (whom Miriam befriends), who
lie in the cold all day on the verandah to
‘benefit’ from the fresh air. Valerie is dete-
riorating, but Miriam — the like of whose
curiosity and boldness Valerie has never
encountered — lifts her out of depression
and loneliness by sheer force of personality.
In her turn Valerie, with an English degree
from Cambridge, reads books from the
library aloud. Miriam, and then Lenny too,
respond to Kafka and George Eliot with
an honesty and freshness which touch the
heart.
But the ‘Gwen’ has its dark secrets. It
Shiver me timbers
Laura Freeman
Minds of Winter
by Ed O’Loughlin
Quercus, £16.99, pp. 496Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a
character put on his sealskin kamiks, musk-
rat hat, wolfskin mittens and otter pelt coat
I buttoned another cardigan toggle and shiv-
ered. It’s a book that gets you down to the
marrow.
The compass of Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds
of Winter points north by northnorth. Up and
up it goes, drawn by husky dogs towards the
North Pole, chillier and chillier by degrees,
frostbitten, snow-blind but determined. It
follows three centuries of explorers of the
North West Territories, each generation on
its own frozen adventure: to find the North-
West passage, to recover an ice-bound ship,
to reach the Pole, to stake a flag, to fly recon-
naissance, to restore an antique chrono-
meter, stolen and stolen again, to Greenwich,
to find a brother who has disappeared into
endless Arctic night.
Wolves block paths, ice flowers bloom
inside the walls of cabin-fevered shacks, snow
preserves bodies that never turn to skeletons,
ice floes drift into open water and ink pots
must be thawed inside clothes before the
ship’s log can be written. In one chapter we
make it as far south as the Orkneys and it
feels positively balmy. When a pilot gives his
name to a new island he reads a christening
prayer: ‘God bless her and all who freeze on
her.’ Freezing to death is a mercy. That at least
is quick. Scurvy, frostbite and paraffin-lamp
madness are slow killers.
Ships are pincered by ice that will not
thaw even in summer. The sailors know
when they are ice-trapped. There is a sound
like ‘giant claws scraping both sides of the
ship’. The polar light is beautiful, but when
you haven’t seen new grass, a fresh orange
or a woman since Greenland, it starts to play
tricks. ‘You lose your bearings, and all sense
of distance, then see a friend across the way,
large as life, waving his arms at you. But when
you approach him he turns into a bird and
flies away, leaving you more lost than ever.’
Don’t be put off by the early ‘1841’
chapters, suffering from a bad case of the
Georgette Heyers: ‘At the head of the line
stood Sophia Cracroft, fanning herself with
her dance card, not because she was hot
but to conceal the fact that her hand was
a-tremble’. Once that’s out of the way, it’s full
steam ahead with seal-clubbing, bear-hunting
and gold-prospecting. It is thrilling Boys’ Own,
Hornblower stuff. O’Loughlin’s research
took him out of libraries and archives and
onto the Arctic ice. It’s not every acknowl-
edgments page that thanks a local guide for
his ‘knowledge, his contacts and his snow-
mobiles’.My aunt woul d sen d m e drawings of
herself under a blanket on a freezing
terrace halfway up a mountain