[In the following excerpt, Poole praises the dignity and skill with which Johnston portrays death and illness in The Christmas Tree.]

Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, described illness as the ‘night-side of life.’ She went on to quote the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger: ‘Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in larger part it is what the victim has done with his world and with himself.’ This existential understanding opens up a bleak perspective. Illness becomes a sort of contemporary equivalent of the mystic's dark night of the soul, a condition that calls everything into question.

This week's batch of fiction sees two very different novelists attempting to explore illness as a metaphor for change, revaluation and, paradoxically, renewal. As the dying cancer victim in Jennifer Johnston's The Christmas Tree puts it, ‘there has to be a pattern,’ and recovering it can be almost as important as ‘recovering’ in the medical sense.

Jennifer Johnston's spare, economical style marks her work off from the rather lush, elliptical mode now fashionable with younger Irish novelists such as Neil Jordan and Desmond Hogan. And here, in her sixth novel, it accords perfectly with her subject: the deathbed narration of a failed writer trying to make sense of a none too happy life.

Like many characters in contemporary Irish fiction, Constance Keating has lived a life of internal exile, alienated from both family and Ireland itself. Returning to her parents' home in Dublin with an illegitimaté baby and the news that she has leukemia, she finds that even in death she is not going to be allowed a true identity of her own. Her mother regards the illness merely as a further confirmation of waywardness, ‘you always had to be difficult’; while her married sister simply wants her hospitalised and out of the way.

In these circumstances the prospect of death lose its sting: Constance's problem is rather how am I to die as I have lived? A Christmas tree in the corner of the sickroom decked out with fairy lights as a reminder of childhood and illuminating the ‘night-side’ comes to symbolise both her defiance and the quiet dignity with which she prepares herself for a lonely death. Dying, perversely becomes a kind of affirmation of self; a way, finally, to take responsibility for all the choices that have marked her out as different. And in a novel that deals so candidly with the pathology of dying, one is grateful indeed for the grace-like quality of those final moments. …