It's coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I've just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow. So begins Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - 'everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people' - Gray's self-proclaimed 'last written words on the subject of myself' records his extraordinary emotional journey.Darkly comic depictions of the medical team - there's the Chipmunk of Doom, who spells out Gray's woeful prognosis uninvited; the charming, floppy-haired neurologist, aka 'Mummy's delight'; the 'mortifyingly pretty doctor' who arrives to fit his catheter; and the elegant nurse who breezily observes he smells of urine - are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, 'Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko', a shameful childhood memory and a masterfully tense 'distraction', written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking one last cigarette.
Reviews
The Observer
Euan Ferguson
"There's no mawkishness here: if there is self-pity, it comes stamped honestly as such. He freely admits his own cowardice, his reluctance to sit down before his yellow notepad and address, even to himself, what was going on. That he has done so gives the reader sharp insight into life lived under a death sentence... He's particularly wise on the musings that so many must have on suicide: what pills would do it, how he'd be found and how much pain it may cause. 'I wish there was a way of just dissolving in the sea, without having to go through the business of drowning first,' he writes."
09/11/2008
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The Scotsman
Allan Massie
"Those many readers who have enjoyed the three previous volumes of the Smoking Diaries will find this one every bit as compelling: less funny, despite frequent shafts of wit, considerably more moving. It's affecting for two reasons. First, Gray refuses to give way. He still finds pleasure in swimming, reading, remembering, in the simple act of being. Second, his love for Victoria, and his dependence on her, shine through every page. He often calls himself a mess, regrets the mistakes he has made, mistakes of social clumsiness rather than malice; yet a certain grace is apparent in everything he writes, a grace that comes from a willingness to look reality in the face, and not be daunted. He would have flown from such a compliment, but he deserves it."
08/11/2008
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The Spectator
Tony Gould
"Reading the published version of Coda so soon after Simon’s death is, of course, an utterly different experience from reading the work-in-progress, up for discussion and comment, of a friend still very much alive. In my initial enjoyment of the lighter moments and characteristic absurdities that Simon relished and rendered (or embroidered) so memorably — such as the scene in which a nurse from Barbados solemnly discusses with him her writing ambitions while not so deftly removing a catheter from his penis — I had failed to take in the extent to which the book is haunted by death."
05/11/2008
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Standpoint
John O'Sullivan
"Since Gray's mind is wry, clever, witty and inventive, the smallest incident - or no incident at all - can give rise to a series of jostling fantasies, generally putting the fantasist in a jam of some kind. Thus Gray skirts around a woman beggar he usually tips because his only cash is a £20 note. She shouts at his retreating back that a male beggar, whom Gray has romantically imagined to be her paramour, has just died. Now thoroughly guilty, Gray ducks into Tesco to get some change, but, being guilt-ridden, feels obliged to buy something. All that he can see in his mild panic is cheese which neither he nor Victoria really like. To avoid embarrassment (and to tip the beggar), he returns home laden with unwanted cheeses."
01/11/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Anne Chrisholm
"Mordantly funny, unsparing of himself and others, desperately brave, it is both compulsive and agonising to read. For all his 40 years as a playwright, his outstanding collaborations with his friends Alan Bates and Harold Pinter, his 20 years as an academic and his distinguished work for film and television, it seems likely to be for his tragicomic chronicle of self-destruction that he will be best remembered. If this is so, it will be for two reasons. First, the seductive brilliance of the writing; Gray is both literary and casual, anecdotal and reflective, so that the reader is drawn into his confidence and flattered by his candour. His style is calculatedly informal, so that reading this book is almost like reading a stream of letters from a close friend."
20/11/2008
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The Sunday Times
Christopher Hart
"Both light and profound, funny and deeply moving... He spares us no details of the dreadful indignity of dying, and the sheer pain of it, too... He also captures brilliantly both the efficacy and the terrible surgical coldness of modern medicine, and the humiliating knowledge gap between doctor and patient. At least the shaman shuffling into your tent and banging his drum and laying his hands on you didn't make you feel helpless and ignorant, even if he didn't cure you either."
09/11/2008
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"Throughout, Coda is a victory of tone. Gray remains himself throughout, undiminished, always truthful, both observant and self-observant. Although describing terminal illness, it is an assertion of life, pleasurable to read, deeply companionable, despite the physical humiliations detailed... Coda is as good as anything he ever wrote."
30/10/2008
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The Financial Times
Lewis Jones
"He writes in a kind of stream of consciousness but with such skilful balance that one suspects he revised carefully. He frequently talks to himself, in the manner of a character in a play by his friend Harold Pinter (“...and don’t forget – don’t forget what? Have I time to remember? Remember what?”), and at his most confessional and serious moments he splits himself into characters called Sicko and Thicko, who engage in knockabout dialogue... The reader – this one, anyway – feels sorry for Gray, and sorry that there will be no more of these delightful diaries. But Gray never feels sorry for himself. And it is a testament to his generous spirit that he even manages to contrive a sort of happy ending."
24/11/2008
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The Independent
Jonathan Sale
"He mocks his doctors. One of them looks like a chipmunk. He catches another specialist having a shifty smoke. As for the doctor who was over-keen to tell him he had only 12 months to live, "I wanted to kill him and say, just as I pulled the trigger, 'That's a year longer than you have, matey'."... With hindsight, he might not have devoted so much space to his late discovery of an obscure Austrian novelist. Also, an author's dialogue with himself can become rather tiresome (Bill Oddie's autobiography falls into the same trap). He might well have cut this brief section, if he'd had his time over again; but, of course, he didn't. "
26/11/2008
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