Gargoyles by Harriet Mercer

Review by Cath Barton

Is the reader of memoir inevitably a voyeur? Or do we prefer to be seen, more nobly, as witnesses? We are all interested in other people’s lives, if we’re honest, and in memoir we are privileged to see below the surface. What the writer does in laying herself bare is an act of utmost bravery. Whether or not this is a cathartic act only she can say; it is surely a way of making sense of what seems randomly senseless in life. Writers of fiction do this, too, of course, but they shield themselves from the challenges of personal revelation.

In 2008, Harriet Mercer spent six weeks in critical care following a catastrophic haemorrhage of the blood vessels in a massive tumour that had developed on one of her kidneys. The tumour was benign but the event life-threatening; she was, she learned only after her discharge, resuscitated. She intersperses her account of that time with reflections on the nature of pain, depression, loss. Mercer’s recollections, both of her time in hospital and of other periods in her life, are clear, direct and devoid of sentimentality. This is not a book to be confused with the ‘misery memoir’ that (typically) describes childhood abuse and recovery, but a much more nuanced account of experience.

Pain does, nonetheless, form the centre of this book. Patients are often asked to give a measure to the degree of their pain on a scale of one to ten. But, as Mercer, says, to what are we to compare our own pain other than what we have experienced before? And how are we to describe the nature of it so as to convey that to anyone else? She draws on the ways other writers have explored this dark territory that is beyond the language we share with others, and in particular their use of metaphor: Alphonse Daudet wrote of ‘rats gnawing at the toes with very sharp teeth’, Hilary Mantel of the ‘clammy ogre’s kiss’ of migraine. For Mercer herself, the horrors of pain manifest as gargoyles: snarling and spitting creatures that emerge from the brick walls which appear when she closes her eyes and force her back into wakefulness, continuing to grimace at her as she endures constant aching and nausea.

It is difficult to conceive of the intensity of another’s pain. What we all know from our own experience is that it is something that can consume us. We also know that succour comes in the form of small kindnesses. Nurses are not all angels; Mercer shows – without reproach – that they are flawed human beings like the rest of us, as are other patients in the hospital, mindful only of their own needs. On the other hand a nurse offers a hot drink at 2am and ‘Peppermint zings up my nostrils; tea has never been more decadent’, while some of her fellow patients become ‘bedside saviours’.

Mercer is a fine writer, pinning down key details of the scenes of her life with the visual acuity of the photography that is one of her passions, and imbuing them with essential colour: on her first walk (almost) alone in Bushy Park after she has come out of hospital, ‘The sky is lapis, the greenery lush; the whippet is kangarooing ahead.’

There is humour in this book. Sometimes it is a leavening, such as a student tale of an old Morris Minor breaking down in the middle of the night outside the police station in Lampeter, and what the duty sergeant may or may not have seen when he checked the car… But joking is also the mask of the depressive, and Mercer includes an essay on this which encompasses her relationship with her father, himself a sad clown.

In 2013, Mercer walked one of the routes of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. It is a pilgrim trail followed by believers and non-believers alike. Some walk with companions, others alone, but all on the Camino meet others. Mercer says that for her it was about coming to terms with absence; walking the landscape gives her the time and space for reflection. She finds intimacy in walking with another person, encountered serendipitously, and ‘a final abracadabra’ with a group who embrace her in ‘a tidal surge of extraordinary warmth’.

Stories with happy-ever-after endings are just that – stories. In real life we are never safe from further pain. Mercer longs to be a mother but it is not to be, and a partner with whom she fits ‘like a jigsaw’ will only be in her life for a short time; she describes that time, though, as an amazing journey. The whole of Gargoyles could be described similarly – it is a book that leaves you with gratitude, a sense of hope, and a feeling of tenderness for its author and for the miracle of life itself.

Gargoyles is published by dead ink, 8th April 2021