It’s odd that a writer as talented as Chloe Hooper should be so underrated – or under-read – in this country. Although her debut novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Orange prize, her work since, largely unregarded, is even better, including the smart, twisty novel The Engagement and two books of reportage, The Tall Man and The Arsonist.
So the publication of new work should be cause for fanfares and bouquets, even though the inspiration for this book is not. Bedtime Story is about Hooper’s husband, the writer Don Watson, and his diagnosis with a rare form of leukaemia in 2018 and specifically about how they can talk to their two young sons about Watson’s possible death.
One problem is that for children this age – seven and four – the issue of parental mortality rarely arises, but Watson is an older father: 69 to Hooper’s 46. “What did you expect?” one friend asks, meaning, Hooper infers, “What were you thinking, having children with someone old enough to be your father?” As treatment begins, even the hospital staff misunderstand: “What good boys!” says one nurse. “Here to visit grandpa!”
The book takes two forms, each pulling the other along: there is the inbuilt tension of Watson’s diagnosis and treatment and Hooper’s search for a way to tell their sons about their father’s cancer.
As a writer, books are her first line of support. But will they help? “Can practising pain on the page circumvent it in real life?” Fairytales, Hooper suspects, will be no good, where “the dead transform into trees or birds”. And aren’t modern fairy stories terribly mimsy anyway, shying away from death and “so benign they don’t bother you at all”?
But what Hooper finds, to her surprise, is that a remarkable number of children’s authors – CS Lewis, Frances Hodgson Burnett, JRR Tolkien, Kenneth Grahame, Philip Pullman, even Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm – lost parents in childhood. “I had been looking for books that specifically address loss when in fact it’s embedded in the books all around us.” Now, she “need[s] to read about those who lived through grief and triumphed”, those who found that “the writing itself was the common palliative”.
The parts reporting her husband’s experience are gruelling but revealing of humanity in extremis: as Hooper weeps in a cafe after an appointment, “the waitress placed a wineglass and then a plate under my bowed head, as if nothing were amiss”. Doctors, she finds, struggle to contain their excitement at encountering such a rare form of leukaemia. But there’s a calm in the storm too. Watson hates the mantra of “living in the moment” (“What if the moment is a terrible one?”), but the period of awaiting biopsy results, of living without knowing, “is, for us, not so bad”.
Bedtime Story is not just a striking voyage of discovery, but a beautifully produced object. The text is illustrated by Anna Walker, whose delicately dark brushwork complements the text: trees materialise in the margins, leading the way; birds race across the page; a black thunderstorm breaks out between chapters. It’s a perfect reminder that fairytales, grounded in reality, are as dark as life itself.
• Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper is published by Scriber (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
