Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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It was a shuffling in his legs that had made Douglas-Fairhurst seek medical advice – and now a neurologist confirmed the worst. An account of living with multiple sclerosis that is both deeply literary and painfully honest as it charts his journey into ill health. Within weeks, he deteriorated further – had blurred vision for an hour when he woke up, fell over in the street by the Bodleian Library, felt electric shocks tasering his spine if he bent his neck.

A few seconds later I found myself peeing into a bush, just outside my front door, while an elderly neighbour walked past tutting and her dog looked back at me with a new found respect. In that environment you’re just an object to be filled with drugs, and drained, poked, prodded, moved around. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmesfilms, gamely waves an ankle at me.

For me the funniest moment arises from a wholly unfunny circumstance; one of the symptoms of his condition is urinary ‘urgency’. He had the latter, with no effective treatment, it seemed, let alone a cure: “My body was like a dying coral reef.

It meant a six-month wait, during which time he developed problems with speech and speed of thought. Reading', he suggests, 'allows us to work out who we are by imagining who else we might have been, or who we might yet become. But he is kind and practical and generous, and those are the things you need if you’re ill – and my book, in part, is a love letter to him.After his transplant, he would need to remain in an antiseptic bubble until his body started to repair itself with the help of his new stem cells. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the brilliant Dickens scholar, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2017. As for treatments, though individual symptoms can to a degree be managed, the neurologist could offer no pill that would slow down the progress of the disease, beyond the possibly beneficial effect of taking high doses of vitamin D. But even as he read, and took solace in that reading, there was no ignoring the fact that his own disease was developing rapidly, symptoms that had previously been content to remain in the background now thrusting themselves wholeheartedly upon him.

And part of the agenda here, no doubt, is to make readers just a little more aware of MS (which clearly has a history of misrepresentation) - whichever passport they currently hold. A series of boxes had to be ticked – involving MRI scans and a lumbar puncture – before he was accepted for treatment. He stubs his mutinous foot against the kerb, and falls flat on his face outside the Bodleian Library.Above all, he discovered the brilliant naturalist Bruce Cummings, whose book The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion in 1919, becomes a parallel text here, with generous quotations from its diary entries and a heartfelt account of the author’s life. The early part of the book answers that, harking back to his south London childhood, lanky teenage awkwardness and love of acting (“being myself was much easier when I was pretending to be someone else”). His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful. Though Samsa is at first cared for by his family, it isn’t long before he becomes a prisoner in his own bedroom, where eventually he dies. It's partly an act of defiance, creating a written narrative out of a bodily narrative over which he feels no control.