Suspecting his illness to be a by-product of syphilis contracted from an ex-lover in Bulgaria, the poet is haunted by his past and his future. He finds himself suspended between life and death, the hospital a claustrophobic, liminal space where he waits, alone with his regrets as well as his hopes for a peaceful life with his partner, L. He looks down at his beleaguered body: “I had hated it so much and been so ashamed,” he realises. “And I might have loved it instead.” He fantasises about the croquetas L will make for him when he gets back home – that is, of course, if he ever gets back home.
Love for L fortifies the poet through his horrifying, isolating weeks in hospital. He longs for him in the most primal way, even as he is forced to acknowledge “the little cruelties of intimate life” – his selfishness, and petty ingratitude towards the man he loves. We are almost 100 pages in before L is finally allowed into the hospital, and the scene is desperately moving. Their reunion is so utterly human, even in such alien circumstances, the poet hooked up to numberless machines, both lovers masked.
Readers of Greenwell’s previous novels may be surprised by the relative modesty of this book. Compared with What Belongs To You and Cleanness, it’s a chaste read without the celebrated sex scenes of his earlier works or their meditations on sadomasochistic power dynamics. The book is also restrained in setting – we aren’t taken cruising in Sofia this time, and there are no romantic jags to Venice or Bologna. Rather, we are brought to the poet’s bedside, in this lonely hospital room at the height of the Covid lockdown. These unexpected reductions give Small Rain a monkish feel, a vast spirituality and a startling intimacy. The poet stares death in the face and is naturally changed by what he sees; family trauma, political unrest, social injustice, the mysteries of human mortality, the simple joy of potato crisps, the horror of political violence. This is a frightening, penetrating, ultimately illuminating novel, one with a scope far beyond its 300 or so pages. Reading it you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, in which the preacher John Ames tries to spell out his failings and his dreams for his infant son before he dies, often came to mind as I read. Likewise Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, with its rendering of Julian of Norwich in her anchorite cell, finalising her book of visions, as she prepares for death. However, unlike Julian or John, Greenwell’s poet survives the close of the narrative. He lives and must go home to face the mundanity of domestic life and the reality of living with his vague and terrifying prognosis. This is where the minute particularities of our protagonist’s story bloom universal. Pressed as we are between climate collapse and nuclear annihilation, don’t we all find ourselves now eyeballing our oncoming demise, reaching inside for the strength not to buckle? Perhaps we always have been; “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” as Beckett put it.
In his darkest hours the poet is assuaged by lines of verse: George Oppen and Geoffrey Hill come to him like angelic visions in his OxyContin daze. Salvific, they spark within him a desperation to work against time, to write as much as he can with however much life he has left. Greenwell’s protagonist is sustained by this determination to offer up work that will provide sustenance, and in giving us this vivid, generous novel, Greenwell himself has made just such an offering.
Lauren J Joseph’s At Certain Points We Touch (Bloomsbury) was an Observer debut novel of the year in 2022
• Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is published by Picador (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
