I’m loathe to focus on a particular aspect of Katherine Brabon’s novel, Body Friend, for fear of giving away an important aspect of the story (which is best revealed to readers in their own time). The particular aspect of the story that I won’t comment on is the central character’s two new friends, Frida and Sylvia, both of whom she meets while recovering from major surgery (Frida at the hydrotherapy pool and Sylvia in the park).

If you read the blurb, it would seem the story is all about the new friends, but the book is really about pain, which Brabon describes as ‘…incredibly singular‘ and as an ‘…intimate presence.‘ Specifically, she examines the experience of chronic pain –

When illness is invisible, the pain manifests in behaviour, behaviour speaks you. Unwitnessed wound, behaviour is the way you say it all.

Brabon highlights the difficulty of the closely held hero’s journey for those living with an autoimmune condition and chronic pain –

‘…when we want to describe our lives, we look for story, and we’re told that stories require beginnings and endings. A start, a plot arc, crisis, and resolution before the end. Illness, when it is chronic, severs these usual links to narrative – we don’t have an end point, but we also don’t have a moment of transformation… There isn’t the beauty of a coda, no orange-gold view like those brilliant skies after a downpour of rain, a sunset that is a recovery, the moment we isolate, that we narrate towards or from. The moment after the crisis when we say, I am through this, and I am changed. I was sick and now I am better… So many narratives tell us this, and we can’t relate to it.’

Brabon doesn’t dwell on other peoples opinions of pain, although makes a valid observation in noting that those suffering from chronic pain hate the ‘…narrative of a cure’.

…some well-meaning person tells you to take celery extract in tablet form and you’ll be as good as new – is it actually well-meaning or just their assumption that I haven’t tried hard enough, that I somehow missed this one extraordinary trick? I’m not looking for a cure – and what is this new they wish so much for me? – but for coexistence, some bearable accord between illness and myself.

There’s much to enjoy in this book – clever parallels with art and artists, and the wonderfully described Melbourne setting, especially the descriptions of the pools the woman visits (the Melbourne City Baths, Carlton Baths, St. Kilda Sea Baths).

I liked the gentle energy of the changing room, the others talking about their days or their pains or their partners, with an openness matching our naked bodies that seemed different from conversations outside… The many languages of this country ringing in the chlorinated air.

Will it win? I think it has a strong chance – there are layers to this story, and the thoughtful structure provides readers with a different reading experience.

3.5/5