For
me, like many people, a holiday is an opportunity to enjoy some reading without
all the usual distractions and disruptions. For our family holiday this year,
just finished, I had been saving the latest novel by one of my favourite
authors, Khaled Hosseini. This was the recently published And the Mountains Echoed. Hosseini’s previous works are The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
It
shouldn’t surprise me that a holiday and a darn good novel is no refuge from
the subject of dementia. This book has a rich cast of characters and it will
not ruin anyone else’s experience of the story if I mention here that one of
them develops dementia. The novel takes in three continents and a period of
more than 60 years, so I’m not giving much away. The book is about much wider issues in relationships, and I am not pretending that dementia is a major theme, but its impact on one person and the immediate family is important in drawing together the threads of the story.
This
is yet more evidence of dementia growing in our collective awareness, in literature,
drama and other cultural forms. What is more interesting, though, is the way a
writer treats the subject. Khaled Hosseini does so with sensitivity and
subtlety, his knowledge of the subject perhaps reflecting his medical training.
The impact of the dementia in this story has as much poignancy as in any other writing
I know of, perhaps more because of its context in the longer story, but I
believe Hosseini’s approach belongs to a newer trend in the way we write and
talk about dementia.
It
seems to me that the conventional approach to dementia, once it became possible
to write about it explicitly at all, has been to emphasise the hopelessness of
the condition. People with dementia are generally portrayed as confused, at
risk to themselves and living in a world of deepening darkness. Some more
recent writing, including this novel, seems to moderate that picture with a
sense that the gloom is neither total nor immediate. In Hosseini’s depiction of
the condition, the sufferer continues to have a close relationship with a daughter
and a neighbour and some enjoyment of simple pastimes such as television. When
a care home finally has to be considered, it turns out not to be the
stereotypical home full of “old women, with ruined faces and whiskers on their
chins, dribbling, chattering to themselves, glued to television screens”. There
is in a nod – brief, but of great significance to the story – to the practical benefits
of diagnosis, the knowledge that “I must wade into the waters, where I will
soon drown”.
It’s
not cheerful, not the stuff of “feel good” fiction. However, it recognises the
difference between utter darkness and gathering twilight. Awareness of dementia includes understanding that it is not a single, predictable experience and that life does not end at
the moment of diagnosis. As with other
forms of suffering in this novel and Hosseini’s other novels, redemption lies
beyond the pain and not in its undoing.
Perhaps
I am being unfair to older literature or perhaps I am just smitten with Khaled
Hosseini’s work. And perhaps you have an alternative view which you would like
to outline in the comments box below.
