As You Were by Elaine Feeney review: an extraordinary debut

Being a hospital patient can be a dehumanising experience, flattening a person into a series of symptoms and statistics, bound together by a gown, a bloods chart and a bed. But in her extraordinary debut novel As You Were, Irish poet Elaine Feeney brings warmth and humanity to the clinical with her story of one Galway ward and its handful of inhabitants, thrown together by the lottery of bad health.

Our protagonist, 39-year-old Sinead, has been diagnosed with cancer, a fact she has not shared with her husband, Alex, or their three sons. Sinead is a complicated character, tough and emotionally withdrawn after a difficult childhood: 'Growing up on a farm I kept bad news to myself, for going public with fortune or misfortune brings drama.'

Italicised flashbacks of her father’s abusive diatribes rear up in the prose, like unbidden thoughts: ‘I think you’re just a very weak child, and the nose running on you again. Wipe it up, you amadán.’

The patients around her have stories of their own. Shane, severely paralysed after a motorbike accident, lies silent in the glow of his open laptop – groaning whenever the charger falls out. Family matriarch Margaret Rose, face drooping after a stroke, ticks off errant family members on her Nokia while fingering her rosary beads. Jayne is suffering from dementia - one moment pirouetting half-naked around the ward, the next sharing lucid memories of her late friend Ann Hegarty, tragically consigned to Ireland’s laundries after falling pregnant. But Feeney roots out moments of humour in this depressing set-up, including with sweet Polish orderly Mikael who ‘didn’t read social cues very well, which gave him accidental power.’

Feeney’s writing is broken into spaced paragraphs, like a series of long stanzas. At times her words tumble like a waterfall, at others, the language is restrained and crisp, paced with the skill of a poet. This is writing that often reaches into your heart and clutches it. A memory of Sinead’s late-term miscarriage is particularly moving – “That’s what they call it now, Contents. And they didn’t probe it or talk to it, with their useless machine, now that the machine no longer answered back” - as is the discovery of a message from Shane to Sinead on his old laptop.

Death looms over the ward, but there are no martyrs here, only flawed humans struggling to reconcile this new reality with their pre-hospital selves. A reminder that life continues to be complicated, even in its final chapter.

As You Were by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker, £14.99), buy it here.