Coda

In previous volumes of his diaries, there's an undercurrent of foreboding about Simon's smoking habit - much of the three volumes include his perspective on watching his friend Harold Pinter's own battle against cancer. He knows, deep down in his writer's heart, that he's unlikely to get away with smoking 60 cigarettes a day for over 50 years (that's over 1,000,000 cigarettes) without his body taking revenge at some point. We are told at the end of 'The Last Cigarette' that doctors have discovered a tumour, but the book ends before we can find out what that means for Simon.He wastes no time in letting us know - the familiar flowing style is still there, as casual, as amusing and as fully disclosive as ever, except this time he's not talking about his love of chocolate, or the old days when he'd drink and behave badly - he's trying in his own way to come to terms with the news that he has a life-threatening illness, and he does so by writing about it.For a few weeks he can't write anything - as the book starts, he seems numbed by shock; a perfectly understandable reaction - but eventually he can't help but start to reflect upon his feelings and experiences as the meetings with doctors pass, and he holidays with his wife in their favourite destination, Crete. They decided that it is better not to know how long he can expect to live, as it would change the way they share their time together.He recalls a horrible meeting with one of they doctors (he gives them all names - this one is called 'The Chipmunk of Doom'), where he starts to ask the doctor how long it would take before they know whether a tumour on his neck is lined to his lung cancer or not. He haltingly enquires "How long...", whereupon the doctor, mistaking the words for the question about life expectancy, jumps in with "about a year". Simon and his wife are devastated and furious, but what can they do? The genie is out of the bottle.Much of the book is written in Crete, and sometimes he wonders as he swims whether it will be for the last time, or as he watches the sea, and of course as readers who now he's died, we are aware that it was. It's very poignant, as well as being as funny as the other volumes were.We are given hope that he is entering remission, and then - abruptly - the book ends. Mercifully, he was spared the final stages of his illness; an aneurism is what finally did for him.It's no fun reading about people's battles against illnesses - I avoid them like the plague normally; I don't find them inspiring; there's not even the voyeuristic thrill that I might have got from reading them when I was young. But Simon's book is funny, and moving; it lacks the portentious heaviness that weighs down similar tomes - it's even light on it's feet at times, dancing with humour and life.

Coda is the last of Simon Gray's four Smoking Diaries. I enjoyed all of them but, over the few years that Gray wrote his rambling, amusing and philosophical diaries/biography, my husband, who'd bought me the first of them, had cancer and died. At the end of the third diary, Simon Gray is also told he has terminal cancer. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the fourth as he goes through thinking about death, his wife and family, and his various doctors with their different approaches to his emotional state. He still managed to make me laugh out loud and still tackled difficult subjects and thoughts with his usual wonderful honesty. In particular I found it so useful in letting me realise what my husband was thinking over his last year - both of them no longer drinking; both smoking to the end. Men in particular are not much good at speaking about what they're feeling and it was wonderful that Simon Gray had his natural means of getting down his thoughts. This sounds a very personal review, but actually most of us are going to lose someone close and certainly we're all going to face death, so I'd say this is a book that everyone should read. It's not depressing, just illuminating, uplifting and witty.

If, like me, you've read all Simon Gray's earlier memoirs, you'll find this a bittersweet experience. Still funny and amazingly fluent (would we could all write like this, with the consummate skill of apparent spur-of-the-moment spontaneity), of course it bears the cloud of impending death all the way through. A lovely last book. Difficult to finish, because when you do it's like finally parting with a dear friend.

Simon Gray wrote wonderfully. His digressions give one the impression that one is listening in to his unfiltered interior monologue. He is wise and witty and does not spare the doctors who dealt with him so insensitively. He castigates the consultant who told him he had a year to live for taking that year away from him. His autobiographical writings are a wonderful legacy.

Beautiful and poignant story. Thoroughly enjoyable read.

Excellent

In `Coda' Simon Gray diarises the diagnosis and treatment of his terminal lung cancer, including the black moments of anger, shame, terror, makes me laugh out loud at least three times and lifts my mood greatly. Little need to add to what I posted last December about `The Last Cigarette'. Here it is again."A delicious treat to be once again in the self-deprecatingly witty hands of Simon Gray's stream-of-consciousness autobiographical persona. Sad too, as I've now only one more to go - Coda - before the cigarettes finally claim him for the smoking room situated somewhere between heaven and the other place, which is crowded with all the most interesting and lovable people. Reading this just after Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I realised (a) just what a clever craftsman Simon Gray is, and (b) what a debt modern writers owe to Virginia."