This week, Scottish science fiction (SF) writer Iain Banks announced on his website that he has late-stage gall bladder cancer and only a few months to live. The short piece titled "A Personal Statement From Iain M Banks" is straightforward, detailing the disease, and what Banks intends to do over the coming days. While the content of the piece cannot but make it serious, there are also, surprisingly, chunks of humour as when Banks reveals that he has asked his companion Adele "if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow".
Banks is matter-of-fact about the details of his upcoming - and last - book, thanking his publishers for advancing its release. There is something mystical, and frankly disturbing, about his ability to look death so squarely in the eye. One wonders if this indicates a ready acceptability of his impending non-existence, and whether that, in turn, stems from a life well-lived. Banks is a wildly successful writer with a cult following among SF enthusiasts.
After the announcement, one fan wrote a tribute on his blog. Speaking of Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory, he said: "Within the first few pages I was completely hooked - I had never read anything quite like it before (or since). It was powerful, macabre, funny and sickening, and it remains one of the best books that I have ever read in my life. I have always looked forward to the new Banksy; science fiction then mainstream and back again."
Even when piled with such generous praise, one would assume that the finality of death would be difficult to reconcile to. Take Christopher Hitchens. The last work of the British writer, who died of oesophagal cancer in 2011, was a series of jottings about "this alien" that "can't want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered."
With Hitchens too one notices that practical voice, involved with getting things done - corporeal, worldly things - utterly oblivious to the pointlessness of it all. By the time Hitch died he had cemented his reputation as a surly, but brilliant, prose stylist. Was he merely being facetious, not willing to risk his reputation by letting the fear of death consume his writing and persona? Was he putting on an act for public consumption even as doubt and dread afflicted his private self?
Writers, of all people, must find death damningly external. Here is one event that they cannot negotiate - an event that must intrude on life in a way that is absolute and final, leaving little time for contemplation and none for narration. That is perhaps why Hitchens raced against time to write about his experience of dying, resulting in the publication of Mortality a few months after his death.
Before news about him started focusing on his dying, Hitch was at the centre of the atheism debate, calling God a "totalitarian ideology" that impinges on individual freedom. But God is merely a term, an idea forever in need of a definition. What would Hitch have called the life force that pushed him to be himself, until the end? Why was he unprepared to go gentle into the good night? Why not simply sit down and wait for the Grim Reaper to arrive?
In 2008, British novelist Julian Barnes published Nothing to Be Frightened Of, part family memoir, part conversation with himself on death and dying. Barnes, like Hitch, is a maverick, and this was a humorous book in spite of its serious subject matter. Barnes introduces us to his quiet, God-fearing father and his rather domineering mother, whose Communist beliefs took her away not only from God but also from her husband.
At its heart, Nothing becomes a book about Barnes' fear of dying and how the questioning novelist in him tackles this fear against an overpowering wish to be comforted by the knowledge of God. There is something about death that forces the best minds to chase it, grab it by its neck and then, with a flourish, impale it. All with little success, of course. Perhaps it is the fact that more than an event, death is a philosophical black hole that defies understanding. No matter how perspicacious man becomes death will elude articulation. In that respect, at least, it is closer to the God debate than our pervasive humanity permits us to believe.
