It came as little surprise that this year’s Booker Prize shortlist included a novel about a man obsessed with ending his own life. But the question on the lips of many in the literary world was why that novel wasn’t Switzy, Emma Cline’s widely tipped book about a retired American executive with Alzheimer’s disease seeking his own personal Swexit at a Dignitas dupe.
It isn’t that Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say—an artful take on Trump’s America through the eyes of Artie Dam, a misunderstood 57-year-old history teacher mulling suicide—didn’t deserve its place. It’s a brilliant novel; my favourite of hers in years. It would be a worthy winner.
But Switzy, one of 13 books longlisted for the prize in July, feels equally vital and twice as raw, aided by Cline’s close third-person narration. It has pathos and humour; I smiled more times reading it than I did over Luke Kennard’s comic novel about masculinity in crisis, Black Bag, which may say more about my state of mind than about Kennard’s wit.
In Cline’s third novel, David Hastings, “age seventysomething”, is hastening his end via euthanasia at a clinic near Zurich, Switzerland—hence the title. We are inside his head; his lack of comprehension is ours, which makes for a wild, sometimes confusing read as he tries to fathom what is happening. When a doctor tells him that amyloid plaque is causing his brain dysfunction, the diagnosis becomes a person: “I hate you, Amy Lloyd, he thought idly.” His liaison in Zurich is a woman named Anna Gould—Ghoul, to him.
The narrative opens on a February night, somewhere over the Atlantic. David is flying to Switzerland via London, where he will see his daughter for a final time, on a private plane lent to him by a former business colleague. He is accompanied only by Cody, his personal assistant. Expensive hotels, lavish meals, chauffeurs and various profligate purchases cushion his final few days: this is end-of-life planning by the 0.1 per cent, assisted suicide as corporate transaction. “Business advice: a successful negotiation meant both parties should come away unsatisfied, both parties should feel a little bit cheated, should feel that they had given up something important.”
While some readers have found David’s wealth alienating, to me it is levelling: not even an extreme fortune can guarantee good fortune when it really counts.
Others share my enthusiasm. David Morrissey, the actor and filmmaker, recently wrote on Instagram: “This is a deeply moving and important book. How it didn’t make the Booker shortlist is beyond me. It is profound and remarkable.” Johanna Thomas-Corr, the Times critic, had tipped it as a possible “worthy Booker winner”.
Cline’s great achievement is letting readers into David’s mind as it unravels. “He kept his notes to himself here,” she writes of a notebook he carries with him. “In blocky handwriting. It wasn’t his handwriting. But it had to be, because he had watched himself write, watched his hand move the pen across the page.”
‘You had to be crazy to do this but not so crazy’
She is granular about the logistics of an assisted death—rare in contemporary fiction, with the notable exception of Edward Docx’s brilliant Let Go My Hand, which follows a father’s final journey across Europe with his three sons. “Ghoul had made the issue of timing very clear – he had to be lucid enough to sign his name, exit with some faculties intact. For reasons of: you had to be crazy to do this but not so crazy,” writes Cline, who made her name with her bestselling debut, The Girls, in 2016.
“It was tricky – he could find himself abruptly disqualified if he passed a certain point. Which could happen at any moment, really. Even if he seemed, for stretches, to be doing fairly well, it was still unknown. When the day would come and he’d find that the contours of his brain had been excised with an ice cream scooper instead of these dainty little teaspoons, here and there. Unknown when the day would come, only that such a day would come.”
Cline’s only real misstep (apart from locating London City Airport in the countryside) is her handling of a subplot about an old school friend to whom David has done something terrible. His lucidity in recounting what happened is too neat to be believable. Or as Chris Power, the critic and one of last year’s Booker judges, wrote in his Guardian review: “The memory is conveniently unavailable, provoking suspense, and then, just as conveniently, it returns to provide satisfaction.”
There is, however, enough satisfaction elsewhere, albeit of a grim kind, to make Switzy one of this year’s must-read novels.
As for this year’s Booker Prize? The winner will be announced on Monday, and I’m rooting for M John Harrison’s speculative tale of societal collapse, The End of Everything, a masterful snapshot of contemporary Britain, art and what it means to be human.
It is up against the toughest of competition, including two former Booker winners in Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, whose John of John and The Disappearers are both impressive and very different takes on gay life. Kennard’s Black Bag would be a rare comic winner, and Strout’s The Things We Never Say, a popular one. That leaves Rebecca Perry, the only debut novelist on the shortlist, whose May We Feed the King elegantly interrogates the boundary between history and fiction through the lens of a curator who uncovers a story about a reluctant medieval king.
But it’s a shame Switzy isn’t still a contender.
