The undiscovered country

Allow me a word about a hidden gem from the Spring season: How Shall I Tell the Dog?: and Other Final Musings, by Miles Kington (Newmarket, 9781557048417). Mr. Kington, a popular British columnist (and the bass player for your favorite band Instant Sunshine), was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007. That's a bad diagnosis. He found himself thinking a lot about his likely impending death, and writing about it. This is the result -- and it's not at all morbid or maudlin, but warm-spirited and funny, and wise, throughout. You might think of it along the lines of Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well-Lived by Laurence Shames, but with less bungee jumping.

Late last year, it was serialized for the BBC Radio Four programme, "Woman's Hour" (with Jenni Murray, one of the great voices I've ever heard on radio). They did it in daily installments for a week, read by Michael Palin. It looks like they've taken down the serial (blast!), but you can catch Jane Garvey's interview with Mr. Kington's widow Caroline here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_43_mon.shtml

I think there might have been a bit of resistance to this book, not only because it's about death (I mean, really...), but because Mr. Kington isn't quite as well known here as in Britain. But the reads on it have been terrific, and it's certainly not "too clever for America" (as they tend to say of things that somehow don't make the leap...). For example, consider this note from Micheal Fraser of Joseph-Beth Booksellers to my comrade Jen Reynolds (reprinted here with permission):

Dear Jen,

I read Miles Kington's How Shall I Tell the Dog out loud to my dogs. That is not an exercise in eccentricity (or insanity) but it forces me to slow down and actually hear and enjoy the language. This was the perfect book to read aloud. I could catch his more subtle humor amid the laugh-out-loud humor.

Couching his memento mori in the form of letters to his agent proposing various books (and responses to already published books) about cancer and death and his observations of life is brilliant. It revealed a man's keen observation of people and events and, although funny, reveals much about his own life, his family and life around him. He truly turns the ordinary memoir on its head and perhaps makes us look at ourselves and our feelings about life and death and dying differently.

As far back as when Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One, the English have thought we (as Americans) had a strange and perverted view of death and the English a rather more balanced perspective. Miles Kington would do Waugh proud - especially when he takes his father-in-law to see Waugh's son, Auberon, enacting a rather mild farce that would be familiar to readers of Decline & Fall or Vile Bodies.

You can give this book all the accolades like heart-warming yet ultimately sad, but even though you are laughing you have to admit that it is searingly honest. I hope I would have Kington's approach to death when it comes time but have I the guts? Do I dare disturb the universe? Kington definitely mixes it up.

How's that for an endorsement? Maybe worth a try? (For more info, check it out on Newmarket's website: http://newmarketpress.com/title.asp?id=889.)