What Book to Read?

Delia Bennet is dying, though there doesn’t seem to be a word in the English language that quite covers her situation. After all, we are all dying from the day of our birth. She has cancer and only a few months to live, but although she tires easily and is forgetful, she isn’t sick; she can still function in her roles as wife and mother and writer. She has three aims: to prepare herself, her husband and her two young daughters for her imminent death, to see if she can tie up a loose thread from her earlier life, and to finish the book she is writing – The Household Guide to Dying.

Delia fell into writing household guides almost by accident. She began by writing a home hints column for a local newspaper, and developed a following by giving ‘unusual’, even insulting advice to readers. Some of this is scattered throughout the novel. She now has guides to the kitchen, the laundry, the garden, and home maintenance to her name, and has convinced her editor that there is mileage in a guide to dying – particularly as she is so well qualified in the area. Information from this guide also appears in the novel, as Delia researches things like coffins – or caskets, as she finds they are now called – both for her own use and for the guide book. And she goes back to a small town inQueenslandto try finally to deal with what happened there some fifteen years before.

The story thus takes place in three different time periods; September-October, which is the present; some months earlier when she goes toQueensland; and the time when she lived there. This all sounds a bit confusing, butAdelaidehandles it without a false step. The pieces are fitted together like a patchwork quilt, to use a domestic image.

This is a sad and moving book; it brought tears even to my cynical eyes. Delia’s plight is rarely sentimentalised, and most of her responses ring true. She is a less angry character than she has a right to be, but not unbelievably accepting. And the sadness is balanced by a variety of humour, from the black to the laugh-out-loud. A guide to dying? Think of the potential readership. And the care of shirts? ‘It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt’. There is also a lot of thoughtful, interesting and amusing comment about housework. ‘Take the washing line, for instance. Here is a site of profound wisdom, generally ignored by men and women alike, despite its centrality to daily life … There has never been an investigation into the true meaning and function of the Hills hoist …’ ‘Like an indigenous language that was no longer spoken’, she says, ‘the lore of household life was rapidly becoming extinct, from descaling kettles to preserving peaches, from the uses for naphthalene to the best method for beer-battering fish’. Adelaideeloquently laments this loss. And it’s not all housework; there are books (including a nice defence of her namesake from Pride and Prejudice) and chickens as well.

There is just one point where I thought there was a danger that Adelaidewas pushing Delia over the top of credible response, but she steadies and gets back on the rails. Some readers might have doubts about whether the ending works successfully, and I’d be interested in other opinions. And just nit picking, I question her interpretation of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). How did women manage before it? she asks, and applauds Mrs Beeton’s image of the mistress of the house as ‘the Commander of an Army’ marshalling her troops. What she doesn’t say is that Mrs Beeton’s troops were not husband and children, but servants – the cook, the parlour maid or the poor little maid-of-all-work. The wife from the new middle class for whom Mrs Beeton was writing needed to know how these things were done so she could oversee others doing them; not for her the personal pleasures of mopping and ironing – if indeed they are ever pleasures, about which Adelaide doesn’t quite convince me. But no doubt nit picking is dealt with in one of the guides.

The novel, which was published in 2008, was long-listed for the 2009 Orange Prize. You can see Debra Adelaide talking about it here, and find more about her here.