One of the many agonies of pain is that you can’t describe it | Eva Wiseman
Garth Greenwell’s new novel gets as close as one can to evoking the very real indignity and physicality of being in hospital
Every now and then I try to write down a description of pain, whether labour, tooth or head, and it becomes a frustrating little game in which nobody ever wins. Doctors try to quantify our pain by asking us to rate it on a scale of one to 10, or by pointing at a variety of sad faces – the McGill Pain Questionnaire consists of 78 possible words to tick, which include “tugging”, “terrifying” and “dull”, words that gamely poke around inside a feeling, but rarely fully land. Often, I wonder if there are some states, like pain, that just defy description – occasionally you think you have it and then the image turns in on itself and loops around and it’s lost – but then I read something like Garth Greenwell’s new novel Small Rain, which begins with our narrator bent double with a twisting pain in his gut. Not only does Greenwell uncover a new language for his narrator’s pain, which mutates in gradations of crisis, but also a language for the beeping, chilly intimacy of a hospital stay, and its terrible wires and humans reaching.
We have all or will all find ourselves here one day, in a raised bed on a humming ward, in the care of scrubbed-up strangers. I have vivid memories of a hospital room with a clock whose minute hand didn’t tick – instead, it slithered without clear rhythm between numbers, very sinister, very unsettling, especially at night when the lights stayed on and you watched it crawl forward towards dawn. In these places you do all you can to remain human by holding on to comfortable things, such as shame or status, for as long as possible, until a brisk nurse perhaps washes your hands for you, or a handsome doctor pokes his pen into the blood clot you present in its clean metal dish.
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