My friend Piotr (name changed to hide identity and nationality) had cancer well before me. He is also extremely well read. So when he kindly offered to chat to me after my diagnosis, inevitably one of the topics that came up was which books he had read about cancer and which would he recommend. Without hesitation he named three:
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn;
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sonntag;
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
I guess there are two main reasons why one might want to read something about cancer when you actually have it. One is to get tips and ideas on how to deal with the illness and perhaps help to cure it. The other is to try to make sense of what has happened to you (this of course is linked with the goal of learning how to deal with it). The three books Piotr recommended fall into the second category. I have now read all three and am really grateful to Piotr for his recommendations.
The last of these is the hardest work. It accurately carries the sub-title “A biography of Cancer”. That is pretty much what it is. It is an impressive work and its 500 dense pages really do give a good overview of the disease through history and the struggle to find a cure. But it is not light reading; it is hard work and downright frightening sometimes. I found it a bit Anglo-centric and the descriptions of the various actors in the story, mainly doctors and researchers, were a bit like characters who had walked in from a 70s or 80s American detective series: rather one-dimensional. Nevertheless, it is clearly a masterpiece, and if you can struggle to the end (I did quite a bit of skim reading to achieve this) you will be very well informed about where this disease sits socially, scientifically, historically and even politically. And that might help you find your own tiny place in all of this.
Sonntag’s book is more of an essay (mercifully only 80 pages!). An enjoyable, erudite read, encouraging us to use precise language and call a spade a spade when discussing our illness. One of the main benefits of reading it for me was it made my illness much easier to talk about.
But the best book by far for me was Cancer Ward. It is not short either, over 600 pages, but this is the one that had the un-put-downable quality for me. It was the only book that was already in my library (why would you have books on cancer unless you work with it or suffer from it….) and a remnant from my student days, when I would plunder charity shops for classic literature or hassle my librarian mother to save withdrawn books for me. Not a cheerful novel on the face of it and, truth be told, dealing with a theme that most of us prefer to avoid if we can. So I never got round to reading it. Until I got cancer myself that is …
Even though the book is set in the Soviet Union in 1955, it is the one where I felt most “at home”, where I recognised myself and my horrifying, frightening situation most clearly. Solzhenitsyn was a dissident Russian author, famous for his works depicting and condemning the Soviet labour camps, where he was himself enslaved. The novel is semi-autobiographical as Solzhenitsyn, sent into internal exile after serving his sentence in the gulags, was diagnosed with advanced cancer and permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent.
What really struck me at first was how the basic treatments available are the same now as they were in the Soviet Union. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy: they have all been technically refined but, despite the repeated and irresponsible headlines in papers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express about new miracle cures and drugs, these three options are basically what is still on offer to us today. This is corroborated in The Emperor of All Maladies: apart from a few newer drugs attacking the oncogenes of certain cancers, the treatment remains the same. The fears and hopes of the patients, the secret recourse to herbs and potions prescribed by traditional pre-Soviet doctors, all these things have modern day echoes here in the West.
Equally disturbing for those of us in the UK, this remains broadly true of the relationships depicted in Cancer Ward between patients, between patients and health care workers and between patients and the monolithic but free health care system. There is an astonishing passage explaining why the Soviet Union dropped its free prescriptions policy – essentially because it was ineffective and wasteful. 60 years later this same debate has hardly even got off the ground in Wales. Health care was free in the USSR of course, even for ex-political prisoners like Solzhenitsyn, but patients were utterly disempowered. I am not saying that the Welsh NHS operates like the Soviet Union! But the disempowerment that runs through the pages of Cancer Ward was certainly something I could relate to.
Even though Cancer Ward is a novel, I felt it gave the greatest insight into what being a cancer patient means and can do to you and recommend it wholeheartedly.
Two more practical books I would mention and which fall into the first category above are Cancer is my Teacher by Lucy O’Donnell , a short, no-nonsense but moving guide on how to deal with your diagnosis, full of useful tips ranging from things like dealing with the sheer administrative challenge to how to tell your (young) children and Anticancer: a New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, which is a kind of handbook on what you can do, in all areas of your life, to maximise your chances of healing and minimise your chances of relapse. Insightful and excellent.
If anyone out there has thoughts and tips on further good books – or even bad books to avoid! – please share!
Just to close: Solzhenitsyn arrived in the primitive Soviet hospital in Tashkent in 1955, close to death. Nevertheless his cancer went into remission on treatment and he died at the age of 89 of something completely different (heart failure).
