... as a theme for a book, I mean. After all, we - the out-patients of a rehabilitation clinic near Frankfurt - enter the world of the sick every day. It is a place of crutches, swollen knees, massage, of sport, hip replacements and herniated discs. It is a world that is as much about state of mind as state of body. Then, at 3.00 we are spewed out of the door. We have been exercised, massaged, fed, and instructed to face the healthy world until the next morning. We are young and old, footballers and pensioners and we represent a wide range of social backgrounds and the attitudes and opinions that often accompany them. It seems to me that this rehabilitation clinic is a snapshot of German society in the spring of 2018 just before the advent of ... of what? We don't know what the future holds so I cannot say what this "what" is.
Thomas Mann had no such difficulties when he wrote his novel The Magic Mountain. Published in 1924, the novel is set in a tuberculosis clinic during the years immediately prior to WW1. Mann's world of cures, of petty rivalries, of pain and inhibited movement, of never-ending soup and exercises, of flirtations and rest cures is a classic, a comedy of manners and an allegory of pre-war Europe.
But what of my novel, if I decide to write it? I don't yet know how it fits into history. Are we living in the years immediately prior to Armageddon in the middle-east? Or perhaps these are the halcyon years before war with Korea or before the collapse of Capitalism. Perhaps I could write an allegory of a broken society. After all, we appear every day at the clinic in order to be cured or helped back to health so that we can integrate back into the normal life of health rather than the world of broken bodies and people defined by their bodily malfunction.
Perhaps I could portray these malfunctions not only as bodily but also as malfunctions of society before it takes action to cure itself. In the clinic we are restricted in movement and focused on getting better. Outside - in the real world - there is a place of health and beauty but also a place of divisions, war and terror, disease and unwanted refugees.
Perhaps, then, this could be the theme for my next novel. Europe on the verge of change or catastrophe in 2018. I already have the characters and the setting. The genre? The novel might kick-start the genre of "sick-lit" and attempt to make up for the relative absence of illness as a theme in novel writing.
Comments