However, as I progressed beyond the beginning of the book, the sparse prose seemed less like a self-conscious style so much as a baldness, a rawness – an attempt, perhaps, to present a no-bones account, a stark account of a painful reality. I felt starved of visual detail and, being a visual person, I missed that. Garner is not a visual writer and I began to get frustrated with wanting to SEE things: the characters and environment, particularly as it is set in Australia – a country I have never even visited. It tends to strike me in the same way as minimalist interior design: too controlled and lacking in personality. Laying my cards on the table, despite the current fashion, I’m not always a fan of ultra-sparse elegance. Stylistically, at first I did not take to this slim volume which – in a reflection of the title – seemed just a little too spare for my liking. Enter: something infinitely more messy and human. (And, even then, can we trust that these “beliefs” truly lie at the heart of our thinking and are not just wheeled out as a guarantee in a tight spot, or as a protection against other beliefs/truths we can’t acknowledge, even to ourselves?) Is it because that conversation is just too difficult? Or, perhaps, because it is only under the most extreme of circumstances that our fundamental beliefs come to the fore. Garner clear-sightedly reveals how we don’t dare talk to each about what we really think, what we really need – or even what we need to think – until it is too late. Where Garner moves beyond this simple dichotomy and gets to the heart of the matter is in her depiction of how such situations can bring out the strangest of battles between people who felt they knew each other…and find out they don’t. Nicola, the new-age optimist (or is it fantasist?), has another. Helen, the pragmatist, has one world view. The scene is set for a ideological clash between traditional and alternative medicines, between facing the truth and clinging onto hope no matter what the cost, between the needs of the “cared for” and the needs of the carer.

Nicola has no children and is determined to stay with Helen whilst undergoing some dubious treatment at a clinic nearby. The spare room of the title belongs to the protagonist (also called Helen) who, as the book opens, is preparing it for the arrival of Nicola, Helen’s dear (and dying) friend, who is coming to stay for some weeks.

Most people who have faced someone close to them going through this situation will surely recognise Garner’s clear-eyed depiction of the emotions and tensions involved. About how all of us cling to certain values for comfort, how none of us can really give each other what we want and need. About the appalling strains that are put on the living in the face of terminal illness about how people cope about how people lie to themselves and to others, determined to cling onto life no matter what.

The spare room novel