Cure by Katherine Brabon review – moments of grace in meditation on chronic illness

The Guardian

3 days ago

Katherine Brabon's fourth novel follows a mother and daughter with a shared experience of chronic illness who travel to Italy in search of a cure. It feels like a companion piece to her elegant previous novel Body Friend, about three women who seek out different ways of managing their chronic pain after surgery. Cure continues Brabon's metaphoric use of doubles, mirrors and reflections to explore the social dimensions of the body in pain. It opens in Lake Como, where, we are told, in autumn 'clouds devour the hills around the lake' and the water 'reflects the scene of disappearance. [It] cannot help but replicate the obscuring fog.' Vera has been here before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a small town in Lombardy, where she herself travelled with her parents as a sick teen, to seek out an obscure man who promises to heal and cure people of their illnesses.
Cure captures the painful intimacies between a mother and daughter: 'Vera has lived this, or a version of this, but she wants it to be different for her daughter,' Brabon writes. Vera and Thea are allied in their shared experience of chronic headaches, fatigue and joints stiffened with pain. Both have been subjected to the banal health advice of others – to take cold showers, hot baths, avoid coffee and consume tea. At the same time the pair are estranged – Thea wants to rebel against Vera's anxious and protective proscriptions; Vera favours curatives such as 'supplement powders, tablets, and tea' over the prescribed medications recommended by her doctor husband.
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The gentle and unassuming narrative shifts between Vera's adolescent pilgrimage to Italy and her daughter's, and between sequences from Vera's early adulthood and scenes of the mother and child at home in Melbourne. Vera is taken to a thermal bath in regional Victoria by her parents, and spends hours connecting with other young women online. In Italy, Thea rests and walks to the lake, meeting a teenage boy called Santo. Writing in her journal, she reflects upon how her mother's journey maps neatly on to her own: the same age, the same bed, a shared illness, a shared purpose. To Vera, her daughter is a 'just a body': 'a mirror of her own body … she cannot see beyond the body, its destruction, its inheritance'.
Thea and Vera's nights are long, edged with pain; the days are repetitious, spent managing that burden. Brabon is sensitive to how time can dissolve in these efforts of maintenance, bracketing the hours with temporary relief. Vera partakes in a fortnightly regime of subcutaneous injections, while Thea relies on painkillers to alleviate the 'fatigue and fever and aching eyelids'. As she swallows the tablets, she 'feels her mother come back to her'. In this cyclical experience of illness, Thea looks to Vera as a template of what will come.
In Thea, Brabon draws a sensitive portrait of a girl adjusting to life in a body that will be constrained. Vera is a complex figure, anxious and tired, whose responsibility for her daughter both draws them together and drives them apart. They turn to writing as a means of communication and escape: Thea retreats into her journal, diarising her own adolescence and crafting stories about her mother; Vera appeals to online communities, where she can share her own experience anonymously. This secret retreat into fantasy is driven by necessity, for it is there that mother and daughter are free to imagine their lives with a supple and mysterious hope.
Vera and Thea must live slowly, carefully, and the narrative reproduces this in its structure – to enervating effect. Between sequences of Vera and Thea in the past and present are italicised passages told from an estranged, omniscient perspective. The pair become 'mother and daughter', 'the woman' and 'the girl'. Thea's upset sleep and swollen knees, initially presented to the reader with first-hand intimacy, are reconsidered with toneless neutrality, a flat recital of events: 'The girl feels both happy and angry'; 'the girl walks to the lake'. In adopting this kind of glacial formalism, Brabon perhaps seeks to capture the effects of bodily estrangement with the sage reticence of a writer like Rachel Cusk, whose novel Parade is quoted in the epigraph. Instead, these italicised passages achieve something more dry, too narrow. The warmer haze of Brabon's other prose better captures the feelings of rupture and dissociation brought about by the sick body and by the family in conflict.
Brabon's play with narration in Cure signals her subtle exploration of how stories of sickness can be confining, too definitive. Shifting our attention to the ill body beyond pathology, she re-engages with the relational and affective qualities of this experience, sketching a dim world, foggy with illusion and mythmaking. Narrative intensity is stripped back for something softer, more reflective. If the novel's carefully refined atmosphere is sometimes remote to a fault, it also contains arresting moments of grace, as Brabon meditates on the stories we tell about our bodies, wellness, healing and memory.
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Cure by Katherine Brabon is out through Ultimo Press ($34.99)