“[I]t’s not a cancer
book, because cancer books suck. Like,
in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight
cancer, right? And this commitment to
charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and
makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing
legacy. But in ‘AIA’, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a
cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna
Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.”
This is Hazel Grace Lancaster’s summary of her favourite
book, An Imperial Affliction. Hazel is the narrator of John
Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and
she has terminal cancer.
Although she has survived its colonisation of both her
thyroid and lungs, Hazel would scoff at the title ‘heroine’. “Cancer kids are essentially side effects of
the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible”, she
deadpans, “…Cancer is … a side effect of dying.
Almost everything is, really.”
It’s hard to pinpoint what makes this book so
irresistible. It had been recommended to
me time and time again, but even so it caught me unawares. Perhaps it was the black-humoured fatalism
with which the main characters treat their diagnoses. Maybe it was their eye-rolling at the seemingly
ubiquitous cheesy sentiment of ‘cancer heroism’. Or it might have been the sheer normality of
the teenage voices living through an entirely abnormal adolescent
experience.
In truth, I suspect it was all three. But what really remained with me was the
extraordinary dynamic between Hazel, her about-to-be-blind friend Isaac from
Support Group, and Augustus Waters, the osteosarcoma survivor with whom she
falls in love.
All three of them would hate this categorisation by diagnosis.
‘[I don’t want] your cancer story. [I
want] your story….” Gus presses Hazel
after their first meeting, “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who
becomes your disease… Cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven’t let it succeed
prematurely.”
Writing teenage relationships isn’t easy at the best of
times. Overlay the intensity of first
love with looming mortality and there is a real danger of heavy-handed
mawkishness. The Fault in Our Stars takes this threat and flips it on its head. It is laugh out loud funny, but beneath the
humour lie strong and utterly believable bonds of friendship. Who but Augustus Waters would address a blind
man’s heartbreak by re-enacting Counterinsurgence
2: The Price of Dawn with a dozen eggs and an ex-girlfriend’s car?
And then there’s the love story itself, which will break
your heart. For teenagers, romantic
relationships are often insecure while death remains largely irrelevant. For Hazel and Gus, it's very different. The result is intensified emotion that their
wise-cracking banter never allows to cloy.
There is an honesty here that is pitch-perfect, and their refusal to be
sentimental means that any ‘overdone’ moments are genuinely moving.
This is not a ‘cancer book’, it is so much more than that. It is a story that will make you laugh and cry
from start to finish. Don’t miss it.
