The Cost of Living Like This

4/5 ( ratings)

This is a hard little book about dying. A man, fairly young and partly regretful, lives his death neither badly nor well, and for a time his dying makes some difference to a few people. His death is not tragedy or comedy but a process: it will happen, then it is happening, and then, with no decent, grassy place marking the flow of time, it is merely something that happened.
--Time Magazine

'A moving and serious book, the harrowing theme is heightened by Kennaway's extraordinary ability to convince us that what he is saying appears not only real but true' Spectator

'This is a sad triumph; a triumph because it is an excellent novel with depth, tenderness, and humour and sad because it is the last novel, posthumously published, of James Kennaway, who was killed in a car accident last year...
The novel is about the last weeks in the life of a thirty- eight-year-old economist who knows he is dying of cancer. This makes the big difference in the conventional eternal triangle situation formed by husband Julian, wife Christabel and secretary Sally. Both women love Julian, but Christabel's courage and humour under stress cannot help him as much as Sally's ignorance of his condition, her health, vitality and zest for life. Kennaway analyses the limitations of human love the selfishness with which Julian, who in his way loves both women, contrives again and again to use them and trick them to help him forget his condition and his prospects.
The final scenes take place in Glasgow, where the whole oddly consorted trio flies to a swimming competition in which Sally is to take part. Here Christabel and Sally in turn encounter a musical sportsman known as Mozart Anderson, and confide their lives and loves to him. Here too Julian and Sally take part in a serious and dangerous student riot, Christabel attempts suicide, and in the end the two women face each other over the hospital bed of the dying man. The story is told with tremendous compassion while the writing is kept light and avoids melodrama; it is a moving and impressive book'
- James Krampus, Financial Times