Sunday, May 01, 2005
Book Review: Elegy for Iris, by John Bayley
As a fan of Iris MurDoch's books and as someone who fears the possibility of a future with Alzheimer's*, I knew that I would read this book some day. It was published and widely reviewed in 1999, and I thought that its premise, a memoir of the love and marriage of John Bayley and Iris Murdoch and also of their relationship during her illness, made sense and seemed the right way to treat this private pain of a beloved figure in 20th-century English literature.
It is a small, beautiful and intimate book, and I was pleased to see that it focused more on their early life together than on the later days when the lovers by necessity took on the caregiver/sufferer roles that -- let's face it --nobody wants.
Their love is represented in vignettes: Events, conversations, jokes and the kind of silly banter that sticks in the memory of the lover, and in a way the whole thing is about memory. It is full of repeated images of water and swimming, in rivers and ponds. Iris Murdoch loved to be in the water, and the two lovers seem to have sought opportunities to shed their clothing and splash about in cold water, and to look at the life underneath the surface.
The way Bayley treats Murdoch's Alzheimer's is what makes this book so wonderful, and why I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, lives in fear of having to take care of a spouse with the disease. He describes his wife as being essentially the same person as she was, and he finds comfort in the fact that she laughs and enjoys jokes and songs, even when she doesn't really understand. He knows he is lucky that she is still her gentle self, and he speculates as to the link between the ego and the level of despair and anguish of the Alzheimer's sufferer; Iris didn't have much of an ego, and doesn't seem to be too frightened of what is happening to her and what she is losing. But ultimately, he admits that he cannot know what she is thinking or feeling, just as he couldn't ever know those things for certain. And that separateness is what he celebrates in marriage; the separate lives lived together in harmony. It is an elegy for love, and for marriage, as well as for Iris, and it leaves the reader with hope and gratitude for the existence of all three.
* My husband's father died of early-onset Alzheimer's, for which he may well have a genetic predisposition. It is something we talk about every so often, and it sort of lives underneath all of our hopes and plans for the future.
As a fan of Iris MurDoch's books and as someone who fears the possibility of a future with Alzheimer's*, I knew that I would read this book some day. It was published and widely reviewed in 1999, and I thought that its premise, a memoir of the love and marriage of John Bayley and Iris Murdoch and also of their relationship during her illness, made sense and seemed the right way to treat this private pain of a beloved figure in 20th-century English literature.
It is a small, beautiful and intimate book, and I was pleased to see that it focused more on their early life together than on the later days when the lovers by necessity took on the caregiver/sufferer roles that -- let's face it --nobody wants.
Their love is represented in vignettes: Events, conversations, jokes and the kind of silly banter that sticks in the memory of the lover, and in a way the whole thing is about memory. It is full of repeated images of water and swimming, in rivers and ponds. Iris Murdoch loved to be in the water, and the two lovers seem to have sought opportunities to shed their clothing and splash about in cold water, and to look at the life underneath the surface.
The way Bayley treats Murdoch's Alzheimer's is what makes this book so wonderful, and why I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, lives in fear of having to take care of a spouse with the disease. He describes his wife as being essentially the same person as she was, and he finds comfort in the fact that she laughs and enjoys jokes and songs, even when she doesn't really understand. He knows he is lucky that she is still her gentle self, and he speculates as to the link between the ego and the level of despair and anguish of the Alzheimer's sufferer; Iris didn't have much of an ego, and doesn't seem to be too frightened of what is happening to her and what she is losing. But ultimately, he admits that he cannot know what she is thinking or feeling, just as he couldn't ever know those things for certain. And that separateness is what he celebrates in marriage; the separate lives lived together in harmony. It is an elegy for love, and for marriage, as well as for Iris, and it leaves the reader with hope and gratitude for the existence of all three.
* My husband's father died of early-onset Alzheimer's, for which he may well have a genetic predisposition. It is something we talk about every so often, and it sort of lives underneath all of our hopes and plans for the future.
# posted by becca : 1:28 PM
