Everyman’s Finale
October
by Richard B. Wright
HarperCollins, 2007
(256 pages, $32.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
Gabriel is a longtime polio victim, now 75 years old. Not that his life has been hard in other respects. He is the wealthy son of a privileged family, with a paid companion. The narrator of the story, James Hillyer, is a childhood acquaintance he has met again by chance just days ago and persuaded to travel with him to Switzerland. They have come so that Gabriel can kill himself legally with a doctor’s assistance.
That is half the plot of Richard Wright’s fine new novel, October, a story crafted with the same skill that has already won its author two major Canadian awards, the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, for his novel Clara Callan. The other half of this new novel concerns the narrator’s daughter, a woman in her forties with an aggressive form of cancer likely to carry her off within the year. She also has something to say about assisted suicide:
“If those people [legal suicide assistants] were down the street, I’d go in a minute. But Europe? The plane ride? All that hassle?” She allowed herself a small, mirthless laugh. “I guess I’m just too tired to die.”
The book is about more than euthanasia. It tells a larger story of aging, and how the enthusiasms of our youth glow again in the mellow light of years. But the core of the story is about facing death and choosing it.
There are many old and handicapped people for whom physician-assisted suicide is going to be the next big question, not just because many of them will long to end their artificially extended lives, but because the high cost of keeping sick people going will create an incentive for having them dead.
Least Prepared Christians
October brings home that the dying will not have to face the issue alone. Their families and all their friends are going to have their say. The institutions that shape our lives will be in on it. Our entire society will be dragged before this question. We will all have to decide what to do.
Among the people least prepared for this discussion, it seems, are Christians. Which is strange because we are the ones who made the pro-life movement famous.
But that movement began when the baby-boomers were having families. Or not having them through contraception and abortion. The issue then was babies whose beauty and human potential were being extinguished by adults. Our experience with babies will not take us very far when we apply it to old, sick people with their good years behind them, who long to be gone.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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